Overcoming Negrophobia: Latin Americans Struggle to Come to Terms with Racial Identity

Hernandez, Arelis, Diverse Issues in Higher Education

All she could feel was pain. The pain f walking through a historic capital leveled by nature. The pain of hearing screams from beneath the rubble. The pain of knowing an inhumane force--racism--made the tragedy worse.

Afro-Dominican activist Sergia Galvan traveled to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, just one day after the earth shook to look for her sisters in arms.

They were lost, the sisters whom for years she worked with to heal the rifts of anti-Haitianism in her native Dominican Republic, a gulf rooted in the violent history and deep racism of their shared island. As a Black Dominican feminist, she is part of a growing Latin American movement that affirms Black identity against the antagonism of negrophobic and so-called colorblind societies.

But in the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated Haiti last month, an outpouring of compassion from the Spanish-speaking neighbor transcended those tensions with the Dominican Republic becoming the first nation to respond to Haiti's cry for help.

"The Dominican Republic is a racist nation with deep anti-Haitian sentiments and it has amazed me to see the solidarity of the Dominican people and to see them transcend that pan of …

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Publication information: Article title: Overcoming Negrophobia: Latin Americans Struggle to Come to Terms with Racial Identity. Contributors: Hernandez, Arelis - Author. Magazine title: Diverse Issues in Higher Education. Volume: 27. Issue: 1 Publication date: February 18, 2010. Page number: 5+. © 2008 Cox, Matthews & Associates. COPYRIGHT 2010 Gale Group.

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