ARKATYPE, Said These are dominicans also! what you show me some pictures and they represent a whole nation????? Guy i could do the same LOL. LINK BELOW.
http://www.bufeo.com/bufeo/modules.php?set_albumName=album1110&op=modload&name=gallery&file=index&include=view_album.php

Growing up in DR, race was never an issue, you either were morenita, indiesita, saba (light skin) with straight, wavy, curly, or kinki hair. That was never an issue for befriending someone, falling in love, getting accepted by a family, getting better grades, or a job.
That only meant you were a different type, and that was never a problem, because you were always accepted no matter what, unless they personally did not like you. That is human in all races. That never hurst your feelings. All the contrary, Dominicams have a very high sense of self, an extremelly high self-steem too high sometimes.

If you konw a Dominican you know what I mean. Dominicans do not care what peolple think about their looks. Trust me on that. Jonny Ventura says it well in one of his Merenge songs "Yo soy el unico negro que vota miel por los poros". were him and his younger group singer were disputing who was the better looking, Jonny Ventura (very handsome and very dark skin guy) and the other vocalist , a younger very good looking guy (light skin, straight light hair), all girlsI thought he was very handsome.
If Dominicans straighthen their hair, that does not mean they have low self steem, all the opposite, Dominicans are very competive and have a betty high steem, they want to look as good as or better than their neighbors!! Nada stop them from feeling good. All cultures like to get away from norms.

And to racism, Dominicans do not get stock thinking and suffering about it. Their mantra phrase is: "No le de mente" -"Olvido, borron, y quenta nueva" which means "Do not give in" "Forget, erase from your mind, and start a new chapter again" Beatiful isn't it? of course, added to that is a loud merengue song to bring up the good spirit and a good joke.

I only got aware and shocked when I came to United States. Where if you looked different people looked at you differently. And even though I have very light skin, green eyes and light hair, coming to United States was a shocking expearience to see how insistent and how much the race issue was disscussed. Back in Dominican in the 80' adn 90's the only race discussion was when some body was calling you "Oye mi morena what are you doing" or using the color clarification of rubia (how they used to call me and saba), negrita, morenita, indiesita, ect.
In conclusion , that article for sure was not written by a Dominican!

Well said Abs200

THE CULTURE PULL PART I


Mariana Ramirez smiles as she sits in Daisy Gran Salon in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. (Picture by Candace Barbot/Miami Herald).

Several women said the cultural rejection of African looking hair is so strong that people often shout insults at women with natural curls. "I cannot take the bus because people pull my hair and stick combs in it," said wavy haired performance artist Xiomara Fortuna. "They ask me if I just got out of prison. People just don't want that image to be seen."

The hours spent on hair extensions and painful chemical straightening treatments are actually an expression of nationalism, said Ginetta Candelario, who studies the complexities of Dominican race and beauty at Smith College in Massachusetts. And to some of the women who relax their hair, it's simply a way to have soft manageable hair in the Dominican Republic's stifling humidity. "It's not self-hate," Candelario said. "Going through that is to love yourself a lot. That's someone saying, ‘I am going to take care of me.' It's nationalist, it's affirmative and celebrating self." Money, education, class -- and of course straight hair -- can make dark-skinned Dominicans be perceived as more "white," she said. Many black Dominicans here say they never knew they were black -- until they visited the United States. "During the Trujillo regime, people who were dark skinned were rejected, so they created their own mechanism to fight it," said Ramona Hernández, Director of the Dominican Studies Institute at City College in New York.

"When you ask, ‘What are you?' they don't give you the answer you want . . . saying we don't want to deal with our blackness is simply what you want to hear." Hernández, who has olive-toned skin and a long mane of hair she blows out straight, acknowledges she would "never, never, never'' go to a university meeting with her natural curls.

*0* Part two is coming after this one gets some debatable replies like the ones before...

AfroLatino...Wow....you are relly consumed with this blackness issue!!!

Well (lol),

Those articles are articles I researched and found in books, magazines and documentaries. Some I have found online, and some from libraries.

However, I will not deny that my activism against racial discrimination is strong... but I would not say consumed, and since it is also my goal to use my field of work in the future to cater to issues that are right in in the arenas of Civil Rights, Human Rights, you know, things of that nature. I am using those reported stories to see how people is reacting to them as far as their responses in regards to the nature of the stories to see where the denials lies.

My friend, indeed I am passionate about making people see without denials the mental slavery which have plagued and kept human beings from seeing past inferior differences to come together.