Talk about hijacking a thread, ay mi madre!.

Back to Sosa:

He is a cheater, nothing more, nothing less.

I don't recall putting all AA's in the same category, I specifically mentioned I came across that attitude on different forums (online) but not in real life. I was raised, went to school and have dated AA females. I've never come across AA's in real life that ever said any of the things I've read on forums.



Not just property.
USA race relations evolved into a very Manicheastic bi-polar view on race. The Eurodescendant majority came up with two culturally defined 'rules' in order to keep & encourage the seperation between themselves and the black minority:
1) One Drop Rule: Any amount of black blood made one socially black, even if that person looked as white as your average white American.
2) Hypodescent Rule: The mixed offspring of a black & white parent took on the lower status of the socially subordinate race, which meant black.
Although this rule was created and enforced upon blacks (USA actually took out mulatto off their census), it has been adopted into mainstream USA culture by both.
One see's this when a person of obvious and known black/white parents is only called black by both blacks and whites. Thus the perception of what is black in the USA evolved into what it is today. You even see AA's discourage mixed offsprings from claiming both sides, I recall reading issues with Tiger Woods claiming both Asian and black. Some of the more militant Afrocentric extremist then go and try to impose this view on other people/cultures, kind of like sometype of AfroSaxon racial imperialism. This very narrow view on 'race' is an anomaly that I don't recall happening anywhere. Africans don't share this view, not even racist Aparthied S. Africa.


Agreed. Anglo-Saxon and now Afro-Saxon imperialism via trying to impose thier views on 'race' on other cultures.


No, I disagree. People don't go around with the results of their genetic test, whatever your phenotype looks like is usually what you will self-identify as and be called by others. David Ortiz is Dominican by nationality, and a black man by phenotype both in DR and the USA.


Agreed that African Americans have some non-SSA admixture so they would not be as 'pure' say a Nigerian Yoruba.But contrary to what many claim, there is precious few contribution from Native Amerindian ancestry. The reason many claim that is because having white admixture has connations of rape, but it has been proven genetically.
A person of mixed white/black parentage would be called black.
The other line of argument I see online is some African Americans who see that Dominicans are of Euro/Afro/Amerind. ancestry and then use that line of reasoning, that so are AA's and they just claim black. They are not comparable in that regards.


No I don't understand where you're coming from. Like I said before with the example of David Ortiz, he is Dominican by nationality and black in phenotype both in DR and the USA (by both blacks and whites). There is no double standard.
What African Americans online do is try to use David Ortiz and Sammy Sosa as the poster boys for DR and then argue against Dominicans themselves about the ancestry & phenotypes of DR. They despise, look down upon and discourage the Spanish component , ridicule the supposed fictitious Amerindian component, and glorify and overly exaggerate the black component.
If Dominicans try to correct the Spanish component, they are labelled 'black deniers,white wanna be, trying to identify with the oppresors'
If a Dominican trys to correct the Amerindian ancestry, they are fantasizing, trying to escape their blackness.
If a Dominican talks about the black component, he's cool.
You see where I'm coming from?

The point is, for whatever reasons, many African American Afrocentric extremists do go around with this Pan African Ideology and their favorites are Brazil, Cuba, DR and PR. Brazil and DR are the current favorites though.

I am confused by what do you mean. Do you mean that if someone like David Ortiz is born in DR he would not consider himself black, but that if he was born in the USA he would? Then I'm afraid you really don't know us that well. The famous merengue singer Johny Ventura is born and raised in DR, he considers himself black. Self-identifying as being black in phenotype has nothing to do with if you're born in DR or the USA.
Dominican is a nationality, not a single so called color or race.
I am Dominican York and majority of my family is too. Here's how it goes, to avoid any confusion let's use the David Ortiz example:
If a Dominican that looks like David Ortiz is born and raised in the USA, here is how he would self-identify as:
-Officially American by nationality.
-Of Dominican ethnicity/heritage
-Of Latino/Hispanic ethnicity/heritage.
-Black in phenotype

Lautaro,

The DomYorks who share anytype of OneDroppist ideology represent a very tinnnny percentage, they are not representative of the majority. That ideology is alien to Dominicans.I've only run into this online by like maybe 1 guy. In real life never. Dominican Yorks are NOT being influenced by USA views on race. If that were so, then Alex Rodriguez would have called himself black by now.
Here are some sources:

http://www.jstor.org/pss/684815
Competing Identities? Race, Ethnicity and Panethnicity among Dominicans in the United States
Jose Itzigsohn and Carlos Dore-Cabral
Abstract
In this paper we explore the racial and ethnic self-identification of Dominican immigrants in the United States. This issue is central in understanding how immigrants experience the process of incorporation into American society. We argue that as Dominican immigrants incorporate to American life, they adopt a Hispanic or Latino identity. This identity serves both as a form of racial identification within the American racial stratification system and as a form of assertive panethnic identity. This identity, however, does not supersede national identification, which remains the anchoring identity.

http://www.jstor.org/pss/2675839
Dominican-American Ethnic/Racial Identities and United States Social Categories
Benjamin Bailey
Second generation Dominican high school students in Providence, Rhode Island do not identity their race in terms of black or white, but rather in terms of ethnolinguistic identity, as Dominican/Spanish/Hispanic. The distinctiveness of Dominican-American understandings of race is highlighted by comparing them with those of non-Hispanic, African descent second generation immigrants and with historical Dominican notions of social identity. Dominican second generation resistance to phenotype-racialization as black or white makes visible ethnic/racial formation processes that are often veiled, particularly in the construction of the category African-American. This resistance to black/white racialization suggests the transformative effects that post-1965 immigrants and their descendants are having on United States ethnic/racial categories.

I should also point out that this applies to other Hispanics/Latino groups also.

Lautaro actually lives there, so he would have more knowledge on it. But I also lived there for a year and I saw absolutley none of that. And do to my lifelong interest in cultural/anthro. topics I would have definitely picked up on any type of so called 'self-hate'.I sometimes feel as if these people that are making commentaries take out their finest scalpels to dissect and comb over in minute detail every aspect of Dominicans, put us under a microscope and then come to some conclusions that they are already predisposed to.
Don't you think that writiing an article in which they pseudo-psychoanalyze an entire nation and conclude that they are trying to be white because some women relax their hair is ridiculous? And they also take it further by suggesting that the reason Dominican women have made a name for themselves in the salon industry is due to that ability to straighten hair? Who can take this seriously?
There are a million things wrong with the entire article.
By the way, Lautaro, Dominican salons have a good reputation for excellent work among ALL LatinAmerican women and AA's. The only ones that I haven't yet known to frequent them are white americans.
My Cuban associates wives ALL do their hair in Dominican salons, my Colombian ex did too.
Don't you think this goes beyond the ability to 'straighten hair"?
I recall when I lived there that all woman took real good care of their hair. It's cultural.

I didn't get to go to Azua, just past by. The only thing I recall is that it had a very dry landscape, almost desert like in some places.
San Juan De La Maguana had a mix, most were somewhere in the middle, some whiter some blacker. My fathers father display either a mainly Euro or indio type phenotype and so does my mom's side. I have searched the family as far back as my paternal and maternal great granfathers to try to see where I get my Afroadmixture, but the most that I could find was some mulattoish green eyed paternal & maternal grandfather. I guess the mixes occured so long ago that there is no clear division. The only surprise was some Cuban ancestry from my great great grandparents. But I think Bani had the greatest concentration in one area of whites that I saw. Some real backward campos around Las Matas De Farfan & San Juan also had some surprising phenotypes, like a half Japanese/Dominican family in the middle of nowhere. I asked them, and they told me their grandfather or something was supposedly came during Trujillo.

USADR, thanks for your clarification..

Amazing, this morning I erased half of the post so it wouldn't be as long as yours and yet yours is way long saying some of the points that I erased.

The last comment about Zoe Saldana was taken from her profile.. She is American born.. Not Dominican born. She is asked when she visits the the DR does she consider herself Dominican or American and she says that she is a Black woman.. She was discouraged by Dominicans to do this but holds strong to still saying she's Black.. Is that taken negatively by Dominicans living in the DR? That's what I'm asking.. not about David Ortiz.

I don't personally know of any Dominican baseball player that claims to be anything other than Dominican. It's assumed, unless one has visited the DR and done some reading, that the average Dominican looks similar to David Ortiz. In some areas this may be true... give and take a little off of the brownness..

And LOL @ manicheastic bi-polar view on race.. I completely agree!

Your next to the last statement about what Black Americans like to claim is true except the fact that Blacks in the U.S. have been discouraged to considered themselves anything other than Black. Many want to give tribute to their other ethnic makeups beside African.. but that gets thrown out the window when they're asked what tribe you come from. Often, it can't be proven so that's that.. a Dominican may not speak an ounce of Taino and he's not challenged.. That's all I'm saying...But true, most Black Americans are more likely to have White bloodline than Native American.

Going back over your comments for today, I think we are pretty much saying the same things.

Concerning DNA..come on.. Of course they don't carry the DNA card.. I merely meant DNA will straightened out any misconceptions of percentages.. that's all.. You can still claim to be whatever you want to be. I don't care. It depends on what day of the week if I decide to be something different or not..

A question.. what are you ties to Anthropology? I'm curious.

Also you can check out just a brief report at this link if you haven't already.

http://www.kacike.org/CalderonEnglish.html
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/genetics/2006-02-01-dna-african-americans_x.htm
http://www.taino-tribe.org/pr-taino-dna.htm

Hello amoree, I can tell you that from my point of view, I have mixed feelings about this. The main reason being is that I think Zoe is doing this because she always gets cast in African-American roles (except in Pirates of the Caribbean), and believes that saying she considers herself Latina will get in the way of her getting more roles. I'm pretty sure she prefers being cast only in roles where she will portray an African American woman vs. not getting any roles at all. I know that this may not be the case, but that's the way I see it. So, I guess I should say that I view this more negative than positive and I'll even go as far as saying that it's a little b.s.-ing on her part. On the flip side, there are situations such as the one that the late Merlin Santana used to face and that was of never being cast for a Latino role when he would audition for one. He once said that it's not that he only wanted to play roles in which he was African American, but he would be told that he didn't look "Latino enough" when he wanted to land in a Latino role. I guess there needs to be more "education" to the American public in regards to Latinos not always looking like J-Lo or Andy Garcia.

Hi Jem237!

That could be true too.. And yes.. America needs to be educated on plenty of things. I live in Kentucky and you'd be surprise to know that a few people think Dominican Republic is in the Middle East and Haiti is in South Africa..and the fact that they share the same island is a complete SHOCK!

So don't expect them to know what a Latina is..

Maybe there should be more Hispanic producers to make films depicting the diversities of phenotype within Latin America in their storyline.

Only education can dismiss stereotype. You should do some reading on the problems faced by Iman when she started her modeling career. People like Alek Wek really defy the older version of the supermodel image.

By the way, you are an absolutely beautiful woman (non-gay comment). I don't think it would matter what complexion you are.....

Oh Jem,

J-Lo hasn't always looked like she does now.. Catch her in the pre-relaxer days when she danced for Janet Jackson and In living color..

and Jessica Alba has changed over the years as well. She's not even trying to cater to her Latin roots.. She's gone from playing Hispanic to just plain White.. but that's Hollywood for ya!