1. Trujillo later also established a detailed
plan to “lighten” the Dominican race. The plan included allowing more Jewish refugees to enter the country, as well as exiles from the Spanish Civil war. He tried filling universities and hospitals with light-skinned professionals to create a great presence of whiteness in professional areas. Some say he even tried altering the Merengue dance so that it more modeled the European waltz. Dominicans were also
often encouraged to marry white partners, or partners with lighter skin, with the hope that the nation would become more successful the lighter its citizens became.
2.After using bleaching treatments, Sammy Sosa even
thought of possibly endorsing the product to others. As Dominican-American
writer Ghislaine Leon wrote in an article for San Francisco Bayview: “This internal self-hate inflicted upon us by our Dominican families goes back generations. Line after line of Dominican families have hated their skin because it was not light enough or because they didn’t have long, silky hair like their Eurocentric-Dominican brothers and sisters.”
3.
DNA evidence has estimated that as much as 85% of Dominicans have African ancestry. Less than .08% have ancestry from Europe. But on a recent census, 82% of Dominicans chose to classify themselves as “indio”, a term many Dominicans have adopted for any person with slightly darker skin. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. , an African-American history professor from Harvard, said in a reflection about who is deemed black in the Dominican Republic after he
visited the country, “Who is black? Who is “negro”? Why, the Haitians!”