Haiti: Activists Charge Harlem Congressional Candidates Rangel & Espaillat Support Apartheid

Emisyon Black Agenda Report - 
Entèvyou ak Dahoud sou dosye Sen Domeng nan
via Lakou NY / lakounewyork.com

Incumbent Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel and his main challenger, State Sen. Adriano Espaillat.

Haiti Activists Urge Rejection of Both Congressional Candidates in Harlem

Incumbent Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel and his main challenger, State Sen. Adriano Espaillat, are both guilty of supporting “apartheid” policies against Dominicans of Haitian descent, charged demonstrators outside a televised campaign debate. Under a law passed by the Dominican Republic and endorsed by Rangel and Espaillat, less than 10 percent of 200,000-plus people with roots in Haiti will quality for Dominican citizenship, even though most have never set foot outside the country and speak only Spanish. Daoud Andre, a Haitian community activist, called on Harlemites “not to vote for either of these supporters of apartheid,” and for “people of conscience around the world to boycott Dominican products and services,” including tourism.

Posting the activists emergency call-to-action below for more details.
Note: the debate was picketed on Wednesday June 11, 2014

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NYC Activists to Picket Lehman College Rangel-Espaillat-Walrond Debate to Protest Candidates' support of Apartheid in the Dominican Republic (DR)
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PLEASE FORWARD AND POST ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Contact: Dahoud Andre, 347-730-3620
         Haitian Community Activist

         Nellie Bailey, 646-812-5188
         Harlem Community Activist

An Emergency Call to Action: Protest Racial Hypocrisy of Espaillat, Rangel and Silence of Walrond in 13th Congressional Race

Activists from around New York City will hold a protest in front of the main entrance of Lehman College (250 Bedford Park Blvd W, New York, NY 10468) on Wednesday June 11th from 5pm to 9pm during a televised debate of candidates running for the 13th Congressional seat: incumbent Charles Rangel, State Senator Adriano Espaillat, and Rev. Michael Walrond. The protest is to let the world know that the real issue of racism in this Congressional Race is not Rangel's comments on Espaillat's Dominican ethnicity but the support of both leading candidates for the Apartheid policy of the Dominican Republic's Government against Haitian immigrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent. The protest will condemn the silence of Rev. Walrond for not speaking out against this human rights travesty.

For generations, Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent living in the DR have been living in a situation of apartheid, treated with disdain and discriminated against because of the color of their skin. Massacres, mass deportations, rape, and all sorts of violence have been their lot. On September 23rd, 2013 the Dominican Constitution Tribunal, the country's highest court, decided to strip all Dominicans of Haitian descent born in the DR between 1929 to 2007 of their Dominican citizenship. In response to the outcry from within the country and all over the world, on May 15th, 2014 Dominican President Danilo Medina proposed what he called a humanitarian bill to resolve the situation. Both houses of the Dominican Congress unanimously passed this bill without debate. The problem with this "humanitarian" law is that out of the 210,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent, the DR Government itself claims were affected by the Sept. 23rd ruling only 13,000 at most will get their Dominican citizenship restored. Not even 10% of those supposedly affected will get relief. This is an outrage and must be opposed.

Click here to read Rangel's praise of the Dominican President for this travesty.

Click here to see Espaillat who bested Rangel by actually travelling to the Dominican Republic to praise the Dominican President for the law and actually calls for it to be a model for all countries dealing with difficult immigration issues. We wonder how Espaillat and all the Dominican immigrants who came to the US without papers would feel if the US actually implemented a law like this.

Directions: #4 Subway or D Subway to Bedford Park Blvd

A Review of Professor Henry Louis Gates' Film "Black in Latin America"

A Bookmanlit Review by Jerry and Yvrose Gilles/April 18,2011
Permission to repost granted by Yvrose Gilles, Bookmanlit

Professor Gates' documentary will be broadcasted this evening [04/19/11] at 8pm on PBS. I think it's important to view the island as a whole unit which has been besieged by political forces both outside and within that are bent on destroying its African heritage.

–Yvrose Gilles

Professor Henry Louis Gates film “Black in Latin America” could not have come at a more appropriate time. This year, 2011, has been declared by the United Nations to be the International year for people of African descent. It is welcome news in Haiti where generations have celebrated their African ancestry. In part 1 of the documentary, Professor Gates looks at the lives of African descendants in Haiti and in the Dominican Republic. He recounts the history of the island mainly from a Dominican perspective. He refers to the island as “Hispaniola” as named by Christopher Columbus and not as the island of Haiti as it was named by its first inhabitants. The Dominicans prefer the term “Hispaniola”, little Spain, so that they can point to themselves as being of Spanish origin. Professor Gates’ film is important because it opens the gate to an important discussion that is at the root of the island’s division into two countries with differing racial identities. The film itself is groundbreaking in its perspective on the history of the two countries, but it misses important historical details that would have buttressed it further. The objective of this review is to add those details.

The people of Haiti are the descendants of Africans taken to the Americas between 1502 to 1866 when the world’s superpowers derived their workforce from the buying and selling and kidnapping of people. Haiti was the first modern nation to abolish slavery and to assert the sanctity of human life. So successful was Haiti’s Bwa Kayiman Revolt of 1791, that it ignited a 13 year war which eventually led to the withdrawal of all European slave trading powers from the island. Spain was the first European nation forced to abandon the island. It ceded its part of the island (present day Dominican Republic) to France in 1795 in the Treaty of Basel. The Spaniards were in such haste to leave the warn-torn island that they may have erroneously left the remains of Christopher Columbus in an old Cathedral in Santo Domingo. The British left in 1798 after an unsuccessful attempt to gain control of the island. The French were the last to leave in November 1803, after they were defeated at the Battle of Vertierres. Leaders of the Revolution proclaimed the island’s independence from European domination on January 1st, 1804.

Haiti’s history is an incredible David and Goliath tale of an island nation led by people of African descent struggling to survive in a world dominated by European powers bent on subjugating them. Isolated, demonized, and crushed by extortion and embargoes, the new Haitian state was never really given a chance to thrive by the nations that it defeated.

Internal feuds and nature also took their toll on the developing nation. In 1844, less than 2 years after a devastating earthquake paralyzed the central government, leaders of the eastern part of Haiti declared its independence as the Dominican Republic. Remaining colonists on the eastern part of the island seized the opportunity to secede from a country that had neither protected their social privileges nor given them access to international markets. The extent of the territory controlled by this new Dominican government remained unclear and the economies and cultures of the two countries remained integrated until the US invaded the island in 1915.

In 1936, under U.S. influence, Haiti and the Dominican Republic reached an agreement over the borders of the two countries. This treaty, signed in the 20th century and called the Trujillo-Vincent agreement, partitioned the island to largely reflect its borders nearly 150 years earlier when the territory was ruled by France and Spain. It was as if the Haitian Revolution had not occurred. Haiti was forced to abandon the notion of the entire island as one country as defined in its original Constitution.

The creation of the two countries from one island has a clear history but historians have distorted that history to support their political agendas. Dominican historians have presented Haiti as an aggressor nation that invaded the D.R. when in fact Haiti simply exercised its sovereignty over territory that it had won from France ever since the 1804 declaration of the island’s independence. Some Haitian historians support the invasion myth even though there was no Dominican state at the time. These Haitian historians find it easier to imagine Haiti as a conquering power rather than realize that it was a besieged country fighting to hold onto its territory.

Fewer in number and lighter in complexion than the Haitians, the Dominicans became largely a phenotypically mulatto state. Dominican leaders used this skin tone difference to argue that blacks are outsiders and that the people of the Dominican Republic are Indios, the descendants of the native population who were wiped out by the Spaniards by the early 1500s.

In the 1930’s, the Dominican dictator, Trujillo¹ took measures to further lighten the skin tone of the Dominican population. Such measures included facilitating the entry into the Dominican Republic of Europeans fleeing Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. At the same time he accused dark skinned people living in the Dominican Republic of being Haitians and slaughtered them. Professor Gates reports that at least 15,000 people were killed. Influenced by Hitler’s arguments about the supremacy of the Arian race, Trujillo commissioned historians to write a history showing that the Dominican Republic was as white a state as possible.

Through schooling and political repression, many Dominicans have learned to reject their African ancestry. Instead they embrace “Hispanicity’’. It is only by speaking Spanish, practicing the Catholic faith, and valuing light skin, do they consider themselves to be truly Dominican.

This year 2011, as the world celebrates African ancestry, we know that many Dominicans and Haitians will want to assert their African ancestry. Although Dominican denial of African heritage is widespread, it is not universal. Professor Gates was able to find an organization in the Dominican Republic calling itself the Kongo Brotherhood. Likewise the assertion of African heritage in Haiti, although widespread, is not universal. Like many Dominicans, there are Haitians who deny their African heritage. Hopefully, by opening up the discussion about African heritage, professor Gates will help people everywhere to recognize that we are all members of the human family and we owe it to the memory of those whose genes we carry to be true to ourselves.

Happy International Year for People of African Descent!

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REFERENCES:

¹ Trujillo's grandmother Luisa Ercina Chevalier was Haitian, she was the daughter of Diyetta Chevalier, a Haitian who settled in San Cristobal, Domminican Republic.

BLACK IN LATIN AMERICA | Interview with Henry Louis, Gates, Jr. | PBS Video

BLACK IN LATIN AMERICA | Haiti & the Dominican Republic: An Island Divided, Black in Latin America, PBS Video

Is Haiti the Lost Civilization of Atlantis?

Is Haiti and the Dominican Republic (Hispaniola) the site of the "lost Civilization" of Atlantis? Atlantis is the legendary island first mentioned by Plato in a series of dialogues. A group of scientist plan to hold a conference next month to explore this subject. Their hypothesis is simple: "...Haiti (Quisqueya) being the remain of the lost Island of Atlantis."

When I heard this theory or hypothesis, I was skeptical. Wasn't Atlantis lost under water? Wouldn't you have to be as "guileless" as a Taino Indian to believe this theory?

It was on the island of Quiskeya (Taino for mother of the earth), the land now divided into the two political zones of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, that historians believe that the world's first complete and total genocide was perpetrated by the Spanish Conquistadors. I've met one Haitian who believes that he is descended from the Taino, so how true that is may be disputed by some.

I read that Plato put forth the "myth" of Atlantis for political reasons, so maybe the "scientist" who are proposing this connection have an agenda. After all, Haiti was once united under the rule of one central government after the Haitian Revolution. Though the inhabitants of the eastern portion of Haiti, who fancied themselves "Spanish", then as now, hated and reviled the Haitians who brought freedom from colonial rule and the end of slavery. In fact, in the Dominican Republic, the "natives" celebrate freedom from Haitian rule rather than freedom from Spanish rule. The feeling being that there is more "honor" and "prestige" in being of Spanish/European descent then of Haitian descent. The irony is that many of the same people who claim "Spanish" ancestry, look more Haitian or African then some native Haitians. And many have close Haitian relatives. Case in point, Rafael Trujillo who ordered the massacre of over 20,000 Haitians. Tujillo was one-quarter Haitian. His grandmother was Haitian.

Haiti does have one unfortunate and tragic resemblance to Atlantis in that Haiti does face the threat of rising oceans. Haiti may in fact sink beneath the ocean as the "mythical" island of Atlantis did. Global warming's effects are evident in the receding and disintegrating glacier and ice shelves. In 2006, in a report commissioned by the British government, a grim picture emerged of the future without prompt action to stem carbon emissions:

“Millions will die from malnutrition, diarrhoea, malaria and dengue fever unless effective controls are in place. There will be acute risks all over the world from the Inuits in the Arctic to the inhabitants of small islands in the Caribbean and Pacific”.

...200 million people are at risk of being driven from their homes by flood or drought... by 2050 60 million Africans could be exposed to Malaria if world temperatures rise by 2°C... 4 billion people could suffer from water shortages if temperatures rise by 2°C.

...The report tells the Caribbean nothing new when it says that rising sea levels will pose serious risks and demand increasing coastal protection. But, it makes the point that, in addition to small islands, coastal cities such as New York and Miami in the US, Mumbai and Calcutta in India, London in the UK and Honk Kong and Shanghai in China would also be flooded.

Global Warming: Caribbean Endangered
by Sir Ronald Sanders

Hurricanes are occurring with more frequency and violence, bringing such total devastation and catastrophic loss that an Atlantis like occurrence resonates with anyone who is caught in the eye of the storm.