Sheridan Wigginton - Unmastering the Script: Education, Critical Race Theory, and the Struggle to Reconcile the Haitian Other in Dominican Identity

Books, Bias, and Blackness: How the Haitian Other Helps Tell the Story of Dominican History and Identity

Unmastering the Script: Education, Critical Race Theory, and the Struggle to Reconcile the Haitian Other in Dominican Identity examines how school curriculum-based representations of Dominican identity navigate black racial identity, its relatedness to Haiti, and the culturally entrenched pejorative image of the Haitian Other in Dominican society. The materials we analyzesocial science textbooks and historical biographies intended for school-age Dominicansreflect an increasing shift toward a clear and public inclusion of blackness in Dominican identity that serves to renegotiate the countrys long-standing antiblack racial master script. The textbooks are for grades two through eight (ages six to fourteen) and are part of the Nivel Bsico in the Dominican education system.

We argue that although many of the attempts at this inclusion reflect a lessening of black denial, when considered as a whole, the materials often struggle to find a consistent and coherent narrative for the place of blackness within Dominican identity, particularly as blackness continues to be meaningfully related to the otherness of Haitian racial identity. The school texts reflect the Dominican Republics larger societal struggle to reconcile its own blackness vis--vis Haitis blackness.

There is considerable literature that explores how Dominican and Haitian identity are largely diametric, situating Haiti and Haitians as the maligned black African Other to construct Dominican identity as being aligned more closely to a European (particularly, Spanish-Iberian), mixed-race ancestry. We analyze how discourse intended for school-age Dominicans is highly nuanced and couched in the countrys past and present negotiations with blackness, revealing neither total denial nor warm embrace. Throughout this book, when we refer to Other, we mean anyone who is separate Similarly, Haitian Other means the socially constructed idea of a binary representation of Haitian identity compared to Dominican identity. When we refer to Haitian Other master script, we are writing about the collective body of narratives that permeate individual social science textbooks and are designed to socially construct Dominican racial identity as something other than Haitian and something other than distinctly black.

The essential nature of dominicanidad (Dominican-ness) is a much-debated topic within and outside the Dominican Republic. Despite paying such close attention to dominicanidad, Dominicans are not unique in their endeavor to self-identify and navigate a range of complex issues. All of Latin America is part of a multiracial, multiethnic, and often postcolonial milieu. However, negotiating that identity in such close physical, historical, and cultural proximity to what has been understood as the Other is what makes the Dominican journey along the path of identity construction particularly intriguing. There is no doubt that how and why people imagine themselves to be connected, or for that matter disconnected, are powerful tools that can be wielded in either helpful or harmful ways. Distinguishing which is which brings its own set of complications. April J. Mayes outlines a wide range of perspectives about how Dominican identity has positioned hispanidad, an emphasis on Spain and its cultural roots, into its own dominicanidad. Frank Moya Pons, Raymundo Gonzlez, Emilio Cordero Michel, and Jos Chez Checo do not see anti-Haitianism as a mere consequence of hispanidad; rather, within the context of Dominican identity, hispanidad represents a nationalism unique to an island divided between two countries long engaged with each other in sometimes cooperative and, at other times, conflicted ways.

Our work here builds on this new wave of Dominican scholarship that undergirds Mayess work, as well as that of Milagros Ricourt and Lorgia Garca Pea, which considers how contemporary perspectives of Dominican identity accept the existence of an African past and seek to properly situate its importance.Unmastering the Script approaches the text materials as an example of Simmonss reconstructing and unburying of an African past, supporting the uneven, highly context-specific, and slow nature of the process she describes.

Many Dominicans consider dominicanidad to be in direct opposition to, and at times threatened by, the perception of a black, impoverished, voodoo-practicing Haiti. Thus, within this framework, Haiti and Haitians function as a negative point of comparison that allows curricular materials used to present Dominican history and identity in a positive manner based largely on their non- or anti-Haitian essence.Unmastering the Script analyzes the simultaneously widening and shrinking divide between the Haitian Other and Dominican identity in school-based historical biographies and in social science textbooksmaterials that form part of the Dominican Republics effort to officially locate blackness within the textbooks and the minds of young readers. Do these messages further a definition of dominicanidad that denigrates blackness or even seeks to render it invisible? Or, to use Simmonss language, do these messages reflect the difficult work of reconstructing an African past? To investigate these questions, we use critical race theory as an underpinning to understand how the master script of social dominance and normatively good qualities of the white, Catholic, Spanish elements of Dominican heritage have the potential to produce deleterious effects on the social, political, and economic advancement of Dominicans of black African descent, as well as Haitians. Conversely, we probe how other messages in the texts situate blackness squarely within the Dominican definition of self. We examine representations of national identity in elementary school social studies textbooks, biographical narratives of the countrys three founding fathers known collectively as