dominican-republic-stripping-citizenship-jpeg-0b572

 

There is nothing more vicious than punishing descendants of immigrants for the supposed crimes of their parents and grandparents. Yet, that’s exactly what the Dominican Republic government intends to do this week.

Greg Grandin at the Nation has been reporting for weeks about what he calls a “slow motion pogrom” in the Dominican Republic. According to Grandin, though the Dominican Republic’s 1980 constitution defines citizens as “persons born in the national territory,” there are exceptions which the DR is using to remove the descendants of Haitian migrant workers from the country altogether.

It is both the roots of this “social cleaning” in racism and violence and the silence from the United States which makes this mass deportation effort particularly egregious. Grandin indicts the United States when he notes that “a vicious, anti-black pogrom is taking place a few hundred miles from the United States, carried out by a very close US ally in the region.” So, what does it say about the US that there has been little effort to dispute or even delay this process?

In a second article, Grandin asks several questions about the United States’ complicity in the deportation of these Dominican Republicans of Haitian descent. He wants to know “Where is the US press? Why aren’t they covering it? And why the silence from human-rights groups?” As the Dominican government militarizes, dispatching police forces to round-up “young men with Haitian features and darker skin,” US media has had little to say about this targeted effort to remove Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent from the region.

The full deportation is slated to happen on June 16th.

 

Jenn M. Jackson is the Editorial Assistant for The Black Youth Project. She is also the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of Water Cooler Convos, a politics, news, and culture webmag for bourgie Black nerds. For more about her, tweet her at @JennMJack or visit her website at jennmjackson.com.