By: Angelina Amsalen
New York’s Dominican Consul General withdrew Junot Diaz’s Order of Merit, calling him “Anti-Dominican” because of his campaign with Haitian author Edwidge Danticat to pressure the U.S. government to take charge on the persecution of Haitian immigrants and citizens in the Dominican Republic.
Diaz, who won the award in 2009, was accused of being unpatriotic for critiquing the human rights violations occurring in the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic has had an unruly immigration problem with many Haitians and Dominicans with Haitian ancestry.
The Dominican Republic has undergone legal changes in 2004, eliminating birthright citizenship in the Dominican Republic; it soon started deporting thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent. “Haitians and Dominicans with Haitian blood who came and worked after 1929 would be denied citizenship,” the Miami Herald reported. Those who were born in the Dominican Republic to parents or grandparents who could not provide proper documentation could be deported. The Dominican Republic now plans to deport about 200,000 “undocumented” residents of Haitian descent.
Diaz was outraged and had a series of meetings with members of Congress to push for reform in the Dominican Citizenship Policy, according to Dominican daily Listín Diario. “Isn’t it time that the world tells the Dominican government that stripping people of their rights based on their ethnic background, setting up part of the citizenry for abuse and establishing an apartheid state is unacceptable?” Diaz wrote in a 2013 piece for The Los Angeles Times, co-written with writers Mark Kurlandsky, Julia Alvarez and Edwidge Danticat, who is Haitian-American. The thousands who have been deported are of Haitian descent and black, which fueled accusations from Diaz and others that racism and Anti-Haitianism have played a huge role in motivating deportations.
Children who have lived their entire lives in the Dominican Republic may be put onto buses and taken from the only home they’ve ever known. Citizens of the Dominican Republic who support the deportation of Haitians claim that it is not fair, that their already-poor country has to come to the aid of Haiti and provide a refuge for its citizens.
Danilo Medina, current president of the Dominican Republic, denied that his country is racist, stating that 80% of Dominicans are black or mulatto and that they are only deporting people without papers. Medina also mentioned that the Dominican Republic gives public education and health care to Haitian nationals.
However, the Dominican Republic is possibly abusing the human rights of people President Medina refers to as brothers. This story sounds all too familiar in the Dominican Republic whose people have long perpetuated a legacy of Anti-Blackness. Trujillo, a Dominican Dictator who oversaw the killings of an estimated 200,000 Haitians in the 1930s, wanted to “racially cleanse” the Dominican Republic. Some say this is similar to what Dominican Republic is doing today. The government is trying to deport all Haitians and Dominicans with Haitian descent to whiten the race.
In a moderated exchange by the Americas Quarterly production, Diaz says, “… the anti-Haitian derangements of sectors in the Dominican Republic have helped widen the gulf between the nations and have made it harder for our communities to be in fruitful communion except through the most reductive, divisive, and—on the Dominican side—sensationally racist generalizations about one another. But if I have to answer you most specifically: [neither side understands] we’re sisters and brothers, that we share a poor, fragile island, and that without true solidarity we won’t make it.”
Junot Diaz coming to the aid of Haitians, who are in fact our brothers and sisters, cost him his award, even though he was exercising his first amendment right. But if an award can be stripped by one’s home country when one speaks out about wrongdoing then it isn’t an award worthy any recognition.