Conscious Use of Self

Dominican Republic

Table of Contents

Introduction3

Background3

Dominican Republic4

Discussion4

The Concept of Ethnicity4

The Role of Race5

History of Dominican Republic7

Conflicts between Nations: The Case of Haiti and the Dominican Republic7

Introduction10

Discussion11

The Instrument11

Conclusion12

Ethnicity and Dominican Republic

Introduction

Background

Race

Race is a system that categorized the human into large groups or population from ethnicity, physical appearance, color, heritable phenotypic characteristics and geographic ancestry. Race prior to the social constructionist era is the equivalence of skin color to cultural dispositions and the type of civilizations by people of non-European descent. In short, before the advent of social constructionism, race signified “rigidity and permanence of position/status within a ranking order that is based on what is believed to be the unalterable reality of innate biological differences (Pinderhuges, 1989).

Racism

Racism is defined as the exacerbation of racial sense or defense of an ethnic group, especially when living with another or others, and designates the anthropological doctrine or political ideology based on this sentiment (Longress, 2006).

Ethnicity

Ethnicity is situational and dynamic, with individuals sustaining and asserting their ethnic identities in uneven and differential ways, depending on the social and political environment that surrounds them (Pinderhuges, 1989).

Sometimes ethnicity is confused, and actually used synonymously, with race. That is, in everyday discussions of identity, one's ethnicity can be thought to refer to his or her race. For Example: Caribbean Americans of African descent might identify themselves as being Black but not African American because of a difference in national origins (Jamaican, Guyanese, Trinidadian, Barbadian), history, or cultural heritage (music, food, dance, etc.). Or someone might be referred to as White but identifies himself or herself as Italian American, Polish American, or Russian American.

Dominican Republic

Dominican cultural identity has been constructed as a negation of Haitian culture through the primitivization of the “natural” frontiers. Racial, linguistic, and cultural differences are heightened into “internal frontiers” as a way of confronting the terror and anxiety caused by the instability of “floating frontiers.” Haiti, as the primitive-other, the neighbor-other, and the other-within, becomes the unconscious primitive that Dominicans want to repress and, because of this, they have constructed a racial and cultural imaginary that differs greatly from their social reality (Carment & Schnabel, 2000).

Discussion

The Concept of Ethnicity

Ethnicity and identity are closely aligned in popular and academic discussions. In fact, many often use the term ethnicity as a way to identify how individuals are grouped or group themselves according to some shared national or regional heritage, religion, class, language, or culture. In other words, ethnicity generally refers to a community or group of people who share some form of “kinship” with each other that identifies them as different from (to varying degrees) other communities within a particular region, city, or nation. It remains a way to differentiate one group from another for political, cultural, social, class, or racial reasons.

Ethnicity usually refers to the members of a minority group that has relocated to a new place across a national border, where there is a dominant native group. For example, the adjective is often used to precede minority, as in ethnic minority. In this manner, the term ethnic ...