Blood, Power, and Privilege: Why the man who ordered the slaughter of a race was not racist
This article argues that Trujillo's ordered massacre of the people in Haiti did not stem from his own racism. Rather, it argues that it was motivated by a desire to please the Dominican elite and a desire for personal power. This article is available in Constructing the Past: http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/constructing/vol7/iss1/15 Constructing the Past Blood, Power, and Privilege Why the man who ordered the slaughter of a race was not racist
“El Negro Sin La Oreja”: A Dialectical Approach to the Blackness in Dominican Identity
“EL NEGRO SIN LA OREJA”: A DIALECTICAL APPROACH TO THE BLACKNESS IN DOMINICAN IDENTITY Kevin E. Nicholes Old Dominion University, 2017 Director: Dr. Delores Phillips This master’s thesis examines ideologies of whiteness through the erasure and denial of blackness in the Dominican Republic and explores the manner in which racial identity has been reinforced and contested. A dialectical approach is utilized to analyze the discourse around the history of the Dominican Republic and a textual analysis is also employed to assist in supporting the findings. The rationale for this study is to access how whiteness became synonymous with Dominicanness and to resuscitate the blackness of Dominican identity which has been relegated to the classification of the “other”. Therefore, drawing conclusions as to how Dominicans negotiate their own identity. Considerable attention will be paid to the role that the United States has played in the shaping of Dominican identity during their interactions with the country as well as the role of the country’s European conquerors. To these assumptions, this inquiry addresses the following questions: How has whiteness become synonymous with Dominican identity? How has ideas of blackness been negotiated or situated within Dominican identity? How have ideas of race been transformed into the norm and maintained throughout the country’s history? I will demonstrate that the prevailing ideas of race which constitute Dominicanidad (Dominican whiteness) have been socially constructed and challenge its construction using one of the same instruments in which was used for its institutionalization, Science.
Aristocratic Century: The sinews of power: political
In his excellent book on the Secretaries of State, Mark Thomson offered ‘the paradox of continuing domination of the aristocracy and the simultaneous insignificance of the House of Lords, per se ’. It is true that, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the supremacy of the House of Commons in financial matters was a wellestablished convention. The claims of the Commons to an undisputed control over money matters, which had been urged before the Civil War, were resumed immediately after the Restoration and a protracted dispute with the House of Lords began. In 1661 the Lords resolved that there were no precedents in history for this new claim by the House of Commons. In 1671, the Commons retorted that taxation ought not to be questioned by the Lords and in 1678 they reiterated that supply was ‘the undoubted and sole right of the Commons’ and ‘ought not to be changed or altered by the House of Lords’. The Lords' attempt in 1692 to assess their own taxes was also abandoned, though they retired under cover of a rather insubstantial smoke-screen that they maintained their power of amendment to be a ‘fundamental, inherent and undoubted right from which their lordships can never depart’. That established, they departed. Geoffrey Holmes quotes a nice example from 1702 when the bishop of Carlisle found himself the only peer answering to a money bill, ‘no other lord in the House regarded what was doing, this being only (pro forma) to preserve a seeming right to dissent from, or amend, any part of a money bill’.