I’ve been following this very intelligent Haitian young man for a few years and when he sent me this video of his thoughts about the current Haitian-Dominican deportations, I wanted to post this and share with my readers.
According to Oogeewoogee,
The American general public was fixated on transgender and “transracial” issues in the past two weeks. But as the Rohingya Muslim crisis continues to unfold ( a tragic situation largely ignored by corporate media news), 210,000 Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic had their Dominican citizenship stripped over night.
We can’t be fixated on one’s luxury to simply identify with blackness while people of color are actually having their identity and citizenship thrown out of the window.
Thousands of Haitians are facing mass deportation– an ethnic cleansing or what Edwidge Danticat calls, an “ethnic purging.” The historical relationship between Haiti and Dominican Republic has always been strained by radical Dominican nationalists who spew what many call “Antihaitianismo,” a dangerous racial bias, anti-Haitian sentiments.
In the video, I explored the media’s fixation on Rachel Dolezal’s “transracial” story against the backdrop of the black Haitian crisis. The love/hate relationship with blackness in our global society continues to spark an existential debate among blacks in the African diaspora–the double consciousness we often face paralyses our humanity. The ability to put blackness on like a fad and eradicate it at the same time essentially makes our humanity temporary… and disposable.
