One of the constant threads of banter that I have with the villages is regarding the future of my DNA in the area. I am constantly being encouraged to father a child with various members of the community, and every day someone shouts out to me “hey, American (they still haven’t accepted that there are places outside of this island that aren’t New York), so-and-so wants to have a baby with you!”. This does remind me of a story I was told about the only two bits of official advise allegedly given to Cambridge doctoral students as they departed off to some jungle somewhere, which was to take the biggest possible hamper from Fortnam and Mason’s, and not to marry the locals. Sound advice, and certainly more brief than the 57 page risk assessment I had to write.

These comments about babies have long become a running joke, but it has recently taken on a rather unnerving side. The rich weekenders who live in the village have long been advising me to do this, as they see it as an economic help, as it would mean that one person in the village would have an EU passport, and therefore could live and work in Spain and send money back to support their family. Certainly when they have fathered children with local women, they have brought them up as their own, and helped out the mother financially. I just see this as a bizarre form of development aid, rather than anything more sinister. However, I recently asked one of the locals why it is so important that I should father a child here, when there are plenty of nice young men locally who are perhaps more suitable candidates for the job. The reply I was given was that “your babies would have pale skin, and would be pretty. No one here wants an ugly brown baby.”

I have become rather accustomed to the strange attitudes towards race and skin colour here in the DR, but even so the casualness of this remark was mildly shocking. Many people say that the DR is not a racist society, and it certainly is not in the terms that societies in the US or Europe might be called be racist. This is probably the result of the huge amount of racial mixing that has been going on here, and so it is difficult to be a racist society when all but a handful (excluding those individuals of immediate European, US, and Haitian descent) would be classed as ‘mixed race’ by any European or US census. However, it does contain a number of trends that could be said to be based on racial prejudice, mainly around the omnipresent and unchallenged idea, even by black people, that white skin is better than black. On every piece of publicity, which of course exist to present a good image of life to be associated with a particular product, the good life that is portrayed contains a skin tone several notches paler than the national average. We are at the start of a presidential election campaign, and I have noticed that the official pictures of the candidates on the billboards are certainly a paler hue than the pictures of the candidates in the newspapers. On a more sinister note, one long standing Dominican politician, Peña Gomez, was long demonised by his opponents for his black skin, with insinuations that he was of Haitian origin and practiced witchcraft. At the same time as doing this, the then President Balaguer would highlight his own French background.

Anti-Haitian sentiment is a huge part of Dominican society but even though Haitians have much darker skin than Dominicans, this is not necessarily the same as anti-black sentiment. The way that Dominicans, many of whom should know better, talk about Haiti is embarrassing and frustrating. At the moment there is a rather unpleasant attempt by newspapers and politicians to demonise a noted campaigner for the rights of children of Haitian immigrants who were born in the DR, and who according to the Dominican constitution are entitled to citizenship. Ironically, a central part of this demonisation is the attempt to remove her Dominican citizenship. In the village, although the Haitians are blamed with some justification for a large number of problems, such as low wages, they are almost always treated with politeness, except by one notorious bully who treats everyone badly.

These trends, of a racially mixed society that has no real internal problems yet has a massive anti-Haitian streak and a view that white is automatically better than black, are confusing for people brought up with European and US ideas of what is racial prejudice and identity. One friend was telling me about the countless African-American academics and activists who come here to do research or campaigns, and bring their ideas of what is culture, race, and racism from the US. They simply do not understand how these things work here, and how it is vastly different from their own ideas, and leave with a mixture of frustration, confusion, and disillusionment.

I am probably better off sticking to my own research.