By Alicia CruzAfter the Panthers' rallied against the Atlanta Falcons on November 15, Beason and others celebrated at the Charlotte Uptown Cabaret strip club. It is there that Gregory Frye alleges that Beason punched him during a confrontation.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg police say Frye reported the incident Nov. 16 but there wasn't enough probable cause to arrest the football player, according to Capt. Jeff Estes, commander of the Central Division. "We interviewed all the witnesses and looked at the club's videotape," Estes said. Why the arrest warrant was issued after this is not known.
Frye claims he suffered injuries to his nose and eye socket that may require reconstructive surgery. The Mecklenburg County Sheriff's Office says Beason was arrested and then released from custody on a written promise to appear in court.
A copy of Beason's arrest warrant said probable cause was found that he "did unlawfully and willfully commit an assault and battery" on Frye "by punching the victim in the face with his fist, inflicting serious injuries," resulting in Frye sustaining a crushed naval cavity and swelling to his nose and eye area.
In a separate incident, court records show, Beason was cited Nov. 12 for reckless driving and unsafe passing and has a pending hearing.
Criminal and civil court records show that Frye has a history of criminal charges and civil complaints. In 2005, he sued a woman for assault, battery and medical costs. The records show the case was dismissed. Frye was later sued in 2006 by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Hospital Authority for $2,320 and then again in April 2009 $4,065 by Atlantic Credit and Finance, a collection agency.
In 2008, he was criminally charged with assaulting a female and writing a worthless check, both cases were dismissed. He also has numerous driving charges, and a larceny arrest that was dismissed.
Beason's attorney, George Laughrun, called Beason "disappointed" and added that "Jon is confidant in the system and confident that he'll clear his good name," said Laughrun. "That's not his nature to be violent off the field."
Panthers' general manager Marty Hurney released a statement, saying: "We were aware of the police department looking into the incident and have addressed it with Jon. At this time there appear to be two different versions of what happened."
Beason's arrest comes a day after he recorded a career-high 17 tackles in Carolina's 17-6 loss to the New York Jets.
Stay tuned to theblackurbantimes for future updates.
So it took the most powerful military in the world 18 years to find the remains of the only U.S. Air Force pilot shot down in an aerial battle in the 1991 Gulf War.
Michael Scott Speicher's bones lay 18 inches deep in Iraqi sand, more or less right where a group of Iraqis had led an American search team in 1995.
The search for Speicher was frustrated by two wars, mysteriously switched remains, Iraqi duplicity and a final tip from a young nomad in Anbar province.
U.S. officials often were blinded by the same myopia that........Full Story
OAKLAND, Calif. - The recession has compounded a decades-long problem for black workers, who began the downturn facing a far higher jobless rate than the general population and have fared worse since.
Now experts are worried that many blacks will remain in crisis even as the economy begins to recover, largely because the recession has eliminated so many working-class jobs in sectors like manufacturing and retail that are likely to come back slowly, if at all.
“Across the board right now the job prospects are slim, but for blacks even more so than average,” said Algernon Austin, director of the program on race, ethnicity and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that focuses on issues affecting lower to middle-income workers.
Tariq Mustafa can relate. Mustafa, 30, has been looking for work since March, when he completed a temporary retail job after he was laid off from a hotel position. He estimates he has filed 100 online job applications as well as spending months pounding the pavement and visiting potential employers in person.
He said he occasionally feels that race plays a role in his inability to get a job, especially in this tight job market.
“Sometimes you come in and you ask for an application, and you know they’re hiring because it was on the Internet, and they’ll say, you know, ‘No, we’re not hiring,’ ” he said. “It’s just, it’s that vibe, just how people treat you.”
The numbers illustrate the sheer depth of the problem black workers are facing. For all the gains that black workers have made over the past 20 years, everywhere from corporate boardrooms to the White House, there remains a persistent gap between black and white unemployment rates.
Since the recession began in December 2007, the national unemployment rate has gone from 4.9 percent to 10.2 percent, while the the black unemployment rate has jumped from 8.9 percent to 15.7 percent, according to government figures.
In addition, blacks have been more likely to drop out of the labor force altogether as many have become so discouraged about job prospects that they have stopped looking for work.
The labor force participation rate for blacks has fallen from 63.4 percent of adults in December 2007 to 61.7 percent as of October. The overall labor force participation rate in the same period has fallen from 66 percent to 65.1 percent, the lowest level since 1986.
Black workers also are likely to take longer to find a new job. In 2008 blacks made up 19.3 percent of the total unemployed population but represented 25.4 percent of the people who had been unemployed for six months or longer, according to the National Employment Law Project.
In good times and bad, blacks face harsher employment prospects for many reasons, including a higher likelihood of past incarceration or homelessness, and less access to a network of friends and relatives who might have job leads. Discrimination, while less overt than in years past, still plays a role, experts say.
“The American labor market is less friendly to black workers than to white workers, and it has been for all of U.S. history,” Austin said. SOURCE
MUNICH - A German court put John Demjanjuk on trial Monday to face charges of being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews at a Nazi death camp and his lawyer immediately accused the court in Munich of bias.
The 89-year-old retired Ohio autoworker arrived in a wheelchair to face the final chapter of some 30 years of efforts to prosecute him, wearing a navy baseball cap and covered in a light blue blanket.
His attorney opened the proceedings by filing a motion against the court's judge and prosecutors, accusing them of treating the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk harsher than Germans who ran the Nazi's Sobidor death camp in occupied Poland. Full Story
MSNBC News just updated this story: It is now believed that shooting suspect, Maurice CLemmons is not inside of the home Washington police have had surrounded. Stay tune to theblackurbantimes for updates to this storySEATTLE - A suspect in the slaying of four police officers who were gunned down in a suburban coffee shop was surrounded by police at a Seattle house early Monday, wounded and possibly dead, police said.
Negotiators were trying to communicate with Maurice Clemmons, 37, using loudspeakers, explosions and even a robot to try to prod him from hiding. At one point, gunshots rang through the neighborhood, about 30 miles from the original crime scene.
"We have determined that in fact he has been shot," said Ed Troyer, a spokesman for the Pierce County Sheriff. "He may be deceased from his gunshot wound."
NBC News reported Monday that police had not been able to make contact with Clemmons.
Clemmons, who has a long criminal history — including a long prison sentence commuted by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee nearly a decade ago — became the prime target Sunday in the search for the killer of Lakewood police Sgt. Mark Renninger, 39, and Officers Ronald Owens, 37, Tina Griswold, 40, and Greg Richards, 42.
Authorities had speculated early Sunday that the gunman might have been wounded at the coffee shop by one of his victims. Troyer said interviews with others detained in the investigation confirmed that theory.
'You need to man up' Police surrounded the house in the Leschi area of the city late Sunday, and a negotiator used a loudspeaker early Monday to call him out by name, saying: "Mr. Clemmons, I'd like to get you out of there safely. I can tell you this, we are not going away."
Any response from inside the house was inaudible from the vantage of a photographer for The Associated Press. But shortly thereafter, police began using sirens outside the house, and there were several loud bangs before the negotiator resumed speaking, saying: "This is one of the toughest decisions you'll make in your life, but you need to man up."
By 3 a.m. Pacific time, the loudspeakers and explosions had fallen silent. Seattle Police spokesman Jeff Kappel said Clemmons has never responded.
Clemmons is believed to have been in the area of the coffee shop around the time of the shooting, but Troyer declined to say what evidence might link him to the shooting.
Investigators say they know of no reason that Clemmons or anyone else might have had to open fire on the four as they sat working on their laptops early Sunday morning, catching up on paperwork at the beginning of their shifts.
"We're going to be surprised if there is a motive worth mentioning," said Troyer, who sketched out a scene of controlled and deliberate carnage that spared the employees and other customers at the coffee shop in suburban Parkland, about 35 miles south of Seattle.
"He was very versed with the weapon," Troyer said. "This wasn't something where the windows were shot up and there bullets sprayed around the place. The bullets hit their targets."
'He was just targeting cops' The Seattle Times reported that investigators have no indication that Clemmons had a motive aimed specifically at any of the particular officers who were shot.
"He was upset about being incarcerated," Troyer told the newspaper. "He was just targeting cops."
Officer Richards' sister-in-law, Melanie Burwell, called the shooting "senseless."
"He didn't have a mean bone in his body," she said. "If there were more people in the world like Greg, things like this wouldn't happen.
Clemmons has an extensive violent criminal history from Arkansas. He was also recently charged in Washington state with assaulting a police officer, and second-degree rape of a child. Using a bail bondsman, he posted $150,000 — only $15,000 of his own money — and was released from jail last week.
Elaine Thompson / AP/
Smoke rises after police set off an explosive device early Monday at a house in Seattle where they believe a suspected cop killer may be hiding.
Documents related to the pending charges in Washington state indicate an unstable and volatile personality. In one instance, he is accused of punching a sheriff's deputy in the face, The Seattle Times reported. In another, he is accused of gathering his wife and young relatives and forcing them to undress, according to a Pierce County sheriff's report.
"The whole time Clemmons kept saying things like trust him, the world is going to end soon, and that he was Jesus," the report said.
Troyer said investigators believe two of the officers were killed while sitting in the shop, and a third was shot dead after standing up. The fourth apparently "gave up a good fight."
"We believe there was a struggle, a commotion, a fight ... that he fought the guy all the way out the door," Troyer said.
The Seattle Times reported that the four officers were wearing bulletproof vests at the time.
Sentence commuted In 1989, Clemmons, then 17, was convicted in Little Rock for aggravated robbery. He was paroled in 2000 after Huckabee commuted a 95-year prison sentence.
Huckabee, who was criticized during his run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 for granting many clemencies and commutations, cited Clemmons' youth. Clemmons later violated his parole, was returned to prison and released in 2004.
On Sunday, Huckabee issued this statement on his Web site: "Should he be found to be responsible for this horrible tragedy, it will be the result of a series of failures in the criminal justice system in both Arkansas and Washington state."
There was no indication of any connection between Sunday's killings and the Halloween night shooting of a Seattle police officer.
Authorities say the man charged with that shooting also firebombed four police vehicles in October as part of a "one-man war" against law enforcement. Christopher Monfort, 41, was arrested after being wounded in a firefight with police days after the Seattle shooting.
The officers killed Sunday had received no threats, sheriff's officials said.
"We won't know if it's a copycat effect or what it was until we get the case solved," Troyer said.
Photo by: THE NATONAL ENQUIRER: Ashley Samson (left, blonde) & Rachel Uchitel (right, brunette)
ABC News has learned that Chelsea Clinton is engaged to her longtime boyfriend Marc Mezvinsky, a spokesman for former President Clinton confirmed to ABC News.
Clinton, 29, is the only child of the former president and current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She and Mezvinsky -- the son of former Rep. Ed Mezvinsky, D-Iowa, and former Rep. Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinksy, D-Penn. -- became friends in Washington, DC, and closer friends when they both attended Stanford University.
The two sent out an email the morning of Friday November 27 saying: "We're sorry for the mass email but we wanted to wish everyone a belated Happy Thanksgiving! We also wanted to share that we are engaged! We didn't get married this past summer despite the stories to the contrary, but we are looking toward next summer and hope you all will be there to celebrate with us. Happy Holidays! Chelsea & Marc."
Clinton spokesman Matt McKenna said the couple became engaged before Thanksgiving. He noted that clearly all previous reporting by media outlets about Chelsea having been married over the Summer was obvioiusly incorrect.
Grand Slam administrator Bill Babcock's ruling was released Monday, and said Williams faces a "probationary period" at tennis' four major championships in 2010 and 2011. If she has another "major offense" at a Grand Slam tournament in that time, the fine would increase to $175,000 and she would be barred from the following U.S. Open.
"But if she does not have another offense in the next two years, the suspension is lifted," Babcock said in a telephone interview from London.
He said Williams is handing over $82,500 right now, already nearly double the previous highest fine for a Grand Slam offense — about $48,000 Jeff Tarango was docked in the 1990s.
Williams lashed out at a lineswoman after a foot-fault call at the end of her semifinal loss to eventual champion Kim Clijsters at the U.S. Open in September.
Williams earned $350,000 by reaching the semifinals, part of her more than $6.5 million in prize money in 2009, a single-season record for women's tennis. Her career prize money tops $28 million.
The American is an 11-time Grand Slam singles champion and ended the 2009 season at No. 1 in the WTA rankings.
Williams' profanity-laced, finger-pointing outburst drew a $10,000 fine from the U.S. Tennis Association in September — the maximum onsite penalty a tennis player can face. But because it happened at a Grand Slam tournament, Babcock was charged with investigating whether further punishment was merited.
He concluded that Williams violated the "major offense" rule for "aggravated behavior." The Grand Slam committee — with one representative from each of the sport's four major championships — approved his decision Saturday.
Babcock said Williams has been informed of the ruling. She has been in Barbados for an exhibition tournament, and her agent did not immediately reply to a request for comment Monday.
Babcock said a "major offense" under Grand Slam rules is "any conduct that is determined to be the 'major offense' of 'aggravated behavior' or 'conduct detrimental to the game."' There is no specific definition of what sort of actions constitute a "major offense."
He said the highest possible fine that Williams could face — $175,000, if she violates her Grand Slam probation — was chosen because it is the difference in winnings between reaching the quarterfinals and semifinals at the U.S. Open. The $10,000 Williams already was docked by the USTA will be counted toward that total; that's why she is paying half of $165,000 now.
During the Sept. 12 match at Flushing Meadows, the foot fault — a call rarely, if ever, made at that stage of such a significant match — resulted in a double-fault for Williams, moving Clijsters one point from victory.
Williams paused, retrieved a ball to serve again and then stopped. She stepped toward the official, screaming, cursing and shaking the ball at her. Williams was penalized a point for that display; because it happened to come on match point, it ended the semifinal with Clijsters ahead 6-4, 7-5. SOURCE
LAKEWOOD,WA - An ambush in a coffee shop near Lakewood, Washington has left four police officers were killed.
Lakewood, a small suburb in Pierce County, is about 40 miles outside of Seattle and houses the McChord Air Force and Fort Lewis Army Bases.
The scene of the bloody ambush was the Forza Coffee Company which borders the Air Force Base. Base Spokesman Bud McKay said the base was not shut down, but security was ramped up around the perimeter as a precaution and the military has offered assistance to police, he said, but it has not been requested.
Sheriff's Department spokesman Ed Troyer was quoted as saying, "This was a targeted, selected ambush. Just the law enforcement officers were targeted."
The officers were sitting in the coffee shop before the start of their shifts, on their computers, when the shooting occurred. Troyer has said that he told reporters that authorities believe the officers were meeting and going over cases or doing paperwork. A lone gunman entered the shop and began opening fire shooting all four officers. Customers inside the shop were unharmed.
Police are looking for two men in relation to the 8 a.m. attack. One of the suspects is described as an African-American man, between 5 feet 7 inches and 5 feet 10 inches tall, wearing a black coat and blue jeans, with a "scruffy" appearance, Troyer said. The man is believed to have fled the coffee shop on foot. Officers were working on getting additional descriptions from witnesses.
"We're doing everything we can," Troyer said. Authorities were conducting searches in numerous locations, he said, and dogs had been brought in to attempt to track the suspects.
Police officials say that there were no known threats against police before the incident.
Police officials are now in the process of notifying the family members of the fallen police officers and the individual departments the officers were from. All were local police officers.
A $10,000 reward was offered for information leading to an arrest.
Normally Colombia has some more rain than normal in September till November/December, but in 2008, it was a LOT more than normal. Most days started out perfect with a bright blue sky and just a few clouds but in the afternoon or evening the faucet is turned on and the city is covered by water. In Bogota we had some streets completely flooded,
but especially in the Northern part of Colombia the damage and suffering was a lot worse. The Rio Magdalena broke through dikes and left at least 50.000 people homeless, mainly in the city of Plato. About 1.000.000 people were estimated to be homeless nation wide because of the flooding and 67 people were killed. Colombia is beautiful...but sometimes, the rainy season really sucks.
One of the things you would have to get used to while living in Bogota are the people driving around with bodyguards in their armored cars with blinded windows and possibly a guy on a motorcycle two meters behind them.
Regularly you will see one or more Toyota(s) or Hummers or other large SUVs with some blinking lights and/or a siren to warn you to get out of the way (or get run over). These cars are normally used by high police or military officers, politicians, diplomats or by rich people.
For “regularl” people there really is no need (or money) for these cars but I imagine that if you have a lot in the bank or are important in some way, it might not be a bad idea to get some extra protection on the road. Even if it would be just to frighten that idiot driving in front of you that does not want to go out of the way. The added benefit is that you do not have the limitation of car use called pico y placa that everone else has!
Once mayor Mr. Moreno decided that people could not use their cars two full days during the week, Colombianos were looking on how to get around the issue. Some thought that getting a foreigner to register your car would make it relatively easy to get a license to armor their car, but at the same time it would damage your car due to the remodeling and the sheer weight of the special glass, it would make it hard to sell said car; el gasolina consumption would go steeply up and besides that you would give the impression that you're somebody worth kidnapping which would actually only draw more attention to yourself. If you want to stay out of harms way, it might be a better idea to stay out of its sight first!
So no armored car if you don't absolutely need it and no bodyguards.
Within the Hispanic, Latino communities, it is very normal to call someone “Negro” or “Negra” or "Moreno" or "Morena." It simply means Black man/woman. This is absolutely not seen as offensive in Colombia or to Latinos and a lot of people will probably not even be aware of the discussion this could cause for example in the U.S.
The population in Colombia ranges from black to white and everything in the middle, mainly due to the Spanish “conquistadores” that took slaves from Africa with them, raped indiginas (native indians) or just had “relationships” with them.
This song talks about that time (around 1600) and the suffering of the slaves in Cartagena (famous city at the north coast of Colombia). This version is from Juanes. If you dont listen to the words you have no clue of it's seriousness as it's Salsita, therefore, very uplifitng.
Lower your speakers a little, the video is loud and not the best quality!
SANTO DOMINGO -- Yara Matos sat still while long, shiny locks from China were fastened, bit by bit, to her coarse hair.
Not that Matos has anything against her natural curls, even though Dominicans call that pelo malo -- bad hair.
But a professional Dominican woman just should not have bad hair, she said. "If you're working in a bank, you don't want some barrio-looking hair. Straight hair looks elegant," the bank teller said. "It's not that as a person of color I want to look white. I want to look pretty."
And to many in the Dominican Republic, to look pretty is to look less black.
Dominican hairdressers are internationally known for the best hair-straightening techniques. Store shelves are lined with rows of skin whiteners, hair relaxers and extensions.
Racial identification here is thorny and complex, defined not so much by skin color but by the texture of your hair, the width of your nose and even the depth of your pocket. The richer, the "whiter." And, experts say, it is fueled by a rejection of anything black.
"I always associated black with ugly. I was too dark and didn't have nice hair," said Catherine de la Rosa, a dark-skinned Dominican-American college student spending a semester here. "With time passing, I see I'm not black. I'm Latina.
"At home in New York everyone speaks of color of skin. Here, it's not about skin color. It's culture."
The only country in the Americas to be freed from black colonial rule -- neighboring Haiti -- the Dominican Republic still shows signs of racial wounds more than 200 years later. Presidents historically encouraged Dominicans to embrace Spanish Catholic roots rather than African ancestry.
Here, as in much of Latin America -- the "one drop rule'' works in reverse: One drop of white blood allows even very dark-skinned people to be considered white.
LACK OF INTEREST
As black intellectuals here try to muster a movement to embrace the nation's African roots, they acknowledge that it has been a mostly fruitless cause. Black pride organizations such as Black Woman's Identity fizzled for lack of widespread interest. There was outcry in the media when the Brotherhood of the Congos of the Holy Spirit -- a community with roots in Africa -- was declared an oral patrimony of humanity by UNESCO. "There are many times that I think of just leaving this country because it's too hard," said Juan RodrÃguez Acosta, curator of the Museum of the Dominican Man. Acosta, who is black, has pushed for the museum to include controversial exhibits that reflect many Dominicans' African background. "But then I think: Well if I don't stay here to change things, how will things ever change?"
A walk down city streets shows a country where blacks and dark-skinned people vastly outnumber whites, and most estimates say that 90 percent of Dominicans are black or of mixed race. Yet census figures say only 11 percent of the country's nine million people are black.
To many Dominicans, to be black is to be Haitian. So dark-skinned Dominicans tend to describe themselves as any of the dozen or so racial categories that date back hundreds of years -- Indian, burned Indian, dirty Indian, washed Indian, dark Indian, cinnamon, moreno or mulatto, but rarely negro.
The Dominican Republic is not the only nation with so many words to describe skin color. Asked in a 1976 census survey to describe their own complexions, Brazilians came up with 136 different terms, including café au lait, sunburned, morena, Malaysian woman, singed and "toasted."
"The Cuban black was told he was black. The Dominican black was told he was Indian," said Dominican historian Celsa Albert, who is black. "I am not Indian. That color does not exist. People used to tell me, ‘You are not black.' If I am not black, then I guess there are no blacks anywhere, because I have curly hair and dark skin."
THE HISTORY
Using the word Indian to describe dark-skinned people is an attempt to distance Dominicans from any African roots, Albert and other experts said. She noted that it's not even historically accurate: The country's Taino Indians were virtually annihilated in the 1500s, shortly after Spanish colonizers arrived.
Researchers say the de-emphasizing of race in the Dominican Republic dates to the 1700s, when the sugar plantation economy collapsed and many slaves were freed and rose up in society.
Later came the rocky history with Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic. Haiti's slaves revolted against the French and in 1804 established their own nation. In 1822, Haitians took over the entire island, ruling the predominantly Hispanic Dominican Republic for 22 years.
To this day, the Dominican Republic celebrates its independence not from centuries-long colonizer Spain, but from Haiti.
"The problem is Haitians developed a policy of black-centrism and . . . Dominicans don't respond to that," said scholar Manuel Núñez, who is black. "Dominican is not a color of skin, like the Haitian."
Dictator Rafael Trujillo, who ruled from 1930 to 1961, strongly promoted anti-Haitian sentiments, and is blamed for creating the many racial categories that avoided the use of the word "black."
The practice continued under President JoaquÃn Balaguer, who often complained that Haitians were "darkening'' the country. In the 1990s, he was blamed for thwarting the presidential aspirations of leading black candidate José Francisco Peña Gómez by spreading rumors that he was actually Haitian.
"Under Trujillo, being black was the worst thing you could be," said Afro-Dominican poet Blas Jiménez. "Now we are Dominican, because we are not Haitian. We are something, because we are not that."
Jiménez remembers when he got his first passport, the clerk labeled him "Indian." He protested to the director of the agency.
"I remember the man saying, ‘If he wants to be black, let him be black!' '' Jiménez said.
Resentment toward anything Haitian continues, as an estimated one million Haitians live in the Dominican Republic, most working in the sugar and construction industries. Mass deportations often mistakenly include black Dominicans, and Haitians have been periodically lynched in mob violence. The government has been trying to deny citizenship and public education to the Dominican-born children of illegal Haitian migrants.
When migrant-rights activist Sonia Pierre won the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in 2006, the government responded by trying to revoke her citizenship, saying she is actually Haitian.
"There's tremendous resistance to blackness -- black is something bad," said black feminist Sergia Galván. ‘‘Black is associated with dark, illegal, ugly, clandestine things. There is a prototype of beauty here and a lot of social pressure. There are schools where braids and natural hair are prohibited."
Galván and a loosely knit group of women have protested European canons of beauty, once going so far as to rally outside a beauty pageant. She and other experts say it is now more common to see darker-skinned women in the contests -- but they never win.
CULTURE PULL
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.
"That's a woman trying to look cute; I'm a sociologist," she said.
Asked if a black Dominican woman can be considered beautiful in her country, Hernández leapt to her feet.
"You should see how they come in here with their big asses!'' she said, shuffling across her office with her arms extended behind her back, simulating an enormous rear-end. "They come in here thinking they are all that, and I think, 'doesn't she know she's not really pretty?' "
Maria Elena Polanca is a black woman with the striking good looks. She said most Dominicans look at her with curiosity, as if a black woman being beautiful were something strange.
She spends her days promoting a hair straightener at La Sirena, a Santo Domingo department store that features an astonishing array of hair straightening products.
"Look, we have bad hair, bad. Nobody says 'curly.' It's bad," she said. "You can't go out like that. People will say, 'Look at that nest! Someone light a match!' ''
Purdue University professor Dawn Stinchcomb, who is African American, said that when she came here in 1999 to study African influences in literature, people insulted her in the street.
Waiters refused to serve her. People wouldn't help Stinchcomb with her research, saying if she wanted to study Africans, she'd have to go to Haiti.
"I had people on the streets . . . yell at me to get out of the sun because I was already black enough," she said. "It was hurtful. . . . I was raised in the South and thought I could handle any racial comment. I never before experienced anything like I did in the Dominican Republic.
"I don't have a problem when people who don't look like me say hurtful things. But when it's people who look just like me?"
