Overcoming the Crystallization of Despair

Racism and xenophobic discrimination in the Dominican Republic, especially state policies against black people of Haitian origin, oppress a community with a long history of exploitation and resistance in the country every day. This oppression affects, in multiple ways, the life and health of those who engage in social activism and the defense of human rights, and who do so under constant threat of repression and even death, in a context where far right organizations frequently work in coordination with authorities to block protest and public action. Although racism is institutionalized and structural in nature, state authorities advance negationist discourses, minimizing or denying grave historical facts such as the massacre of 1937, the racist campaign against the late politician José Francisco Peña Gómez, the law 168-13 that retroactively removed the nationality of more than four generations of person of Haitian origin. The combination of a struggle that is increasingly better endowed with theoretical tools and politics to change this reality of racist oppression and the realization of studies on the wear and tear that racism imposes on our health, enable us to deepen perspectives of liberation for new generations of activists.