Unmasking the Script: Education, Critical Race Theory, and the Struggle to Reconcile the Haitian Other in Dominican Identity by Sheridan Wigginton and Richard T. Middleton IV (review)

Known for its uneasy relationship with its racial heritage, the Dominican Republic has fashioned its national identity around a positively coded white Catholic Hispanic heritage, and in opposition to the Haitian other, which is coded pejoratively as black, foreign, and harmful. This “Haitian Other master script,” as Sheridan Wigginton and Richard T. Middleton IV call it (23), serves as the foundation for the historic erasure and violent rejection of blackness in Dominican society.

This book explores how public education shapes both racial ideology and national identity in the contemporary Dominican Republic, by analyzing a selection of grade-school social science textbooks. Therein, Wigginton and Middleton find evidence of increasing recognition of blackness within Dominican national identity. Despite this discursive inclusion, they argue that social science textbooks continue to situate blackness pejoratively, in relation to a culturally entrenched image of the Haitian Other.

Each of the book’s four substantive chapters examines a distinct set of texts adopted at the national level for elementary instruction (grades 2 through 8). Chapter 1 exposes Dominican pigmentocracy through an analysis of biographical narratives of three distinctly racialized Dominican national heroes celebrated for securing independence from Haiti. Chapter 2 highlights a failure to connect past anti-Haitian violence with contemporary racism in an eighth- grade social sciences text’s critique of dictator Rafael Trujillo, who famously ordered the 1937 massacre of Haitians. Echoing the first chapter, Chapter 3 demonstrates how the biographies of two Dominican politicians (the Haitian-descended José Francisco Peña Gómez and his opponent Joaquín Balaguer, who exploited anti-Haitian sentiment against him) advanced whiteness in Dominican heritage. The fourth chapter traces the denigration of blackness and the promotion of whitening in three social science textbooks published in 1997 and assigned to second, third, and fifth grades. The conclusion argues that the Haitian Other and white Hispanic heritage are equally important in defining Dominican identity and offers some thoughts on the future of Dominican pedagogy.

The book’s strength lies in its compelling and original exploration of the ways social science curriculum shapes the racialization of Dominican national identity. Wigginton and Middleton convincingly demonstrate how selected textbooks reinforce anti-blackness by invoking historic references to the Haitian Other. However, some readers might wonder how representative the chosen texts are of the body of curriculum adopted across Dominican elementary education. A brief explanation of the methods employed to select the sources, how other required textbooks excluded from their analysis compare to those examined, and how the prevailing treatment of blackness has changed since the publication of the examined texts would have provided the background necessary to evaluate the argument’s reach.

The book also raises questions about the influence of US racial thinking on academic research on race in Latin America and the Caribbean. In this regard, the deployment of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a framework developed by legal scholars to interrogate race relations in the United States, deserves more careful attention. A compelling rationale for applying this theory to explore race and nation in a former Spanish colony requires more sustained engagement with the robust field of comparative race relations, in development since the 1940s (for an overview, see Alejandro de la Fuente, 2004).

Moreover, although the authors reference CRT scholarship in the US-focused field of education (10-11), its application to curriculum in the Dominican Republic might have seemed more intuitive had the authors framed it within the history of US military intervention there. References to existing scholarship on public education and culture in US-occupied Puerto Rico and Cuba, for instance, might have helped support this line of argument, in addition to situating the book theoretically and methodologically within the scholarship on the Hispanic Caribbean by authors such as José-Manuel Navarro, Solsiree del Moral, and...