It's Complicated
When you have descendants from the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Trinidad, and Venezuela, it makes for a very complicated situation. I often get asked where I am from and why I’ve started a business to connect the African Diaspora around content when I am… then come the blank stares and silence. I’m too big to be Hispanic and not dark enough to be black but my “my skin is really soft”, lol, so I’ve heard. I’ve grown accustomed to the ambiguity that I throw onto the people who have those thoughts and make those remarks.
I think it is very “interesting” how a large portion of America is so focused on the color of one's skin to classify, make judgments on who one is, where they came from, or where they’re going. It wasn't until I was in college that I realized that I grew up with a small complex about the color of my skin since I heard it from my very own family (mostly in a joking format but those jokes still made an impact). Moving to the United States certainly did not make the situation any better. It made it more challenging since I was light-skinned and spoke Spanish, but had black and brown parents and family members. So here’s a little insight on those of you who may be completely ignorant to who I am, where I come from, and where I am going.
Many parts of the world see the color of a person’s skin in a similar way as some in the United States (yes I am being general to keep it PC), but many countries don’t see the color lines the same way; sometimes they can go completely blind of a person’s color. That is the way many of us from the islands look at color: blindly. You can have Dominicans who have very fair skin and light eyes, to Dominicans who have the darkest shades of brown and black. For instance, the image of this gentleman below. He is a Haitian man. Oh, and he also happens to be my uncle who is no longer with us.
The Dominican Republic:
Many academics have written that the Bozales brought directly from Africa to Hispaniola as slaves in the early sixteenth century were shipped mainly from the Cape Verde island of Santiago, but were gathered from all over the region called Upper Guinea, which encompassed a multitude of different African peoples who lived between what we know of today as Senegal and Sierra Leone. For those of you Dominicans who continue to contradict the fact that you come from a complicated mix of African slaves, Taino Indians, and settlers from the West Indies - sorry to burst your bubble but you’re part African whether you think so or not.
Fast forward a few years ahead and I have the opportunity to create a company that really empowers the African American community and eventually connects Afro-European, Afro-Caribbean, and Africans from the continent and allows them to see themselves on screen, which is a luxury many of us grew up without, or at least not to the extent as we see today.
The incredible importance behind this is that today content or media is an integral part of our world. If we as African Americans, Afro-Europeans, Afro-Caribbeans, or Africans see ourselves on a medium that we hold at such high regards, it has tremendous effects on how we look at ourselves in the world, our brain development, and potentially our outcomes. Traditionally, media was owned and managed by the wealthier businesses who were managed by individuals who were born into that level of privilege or opportunities. I guess that, selfishly, I want little black and brown kids to grow up with the hope and opportunities that everyone else has when they see people that look like them on TV. I want kids like these to have the opportunities I had to bulldoze through come to them but without the bulldozing. I can handle it; if you haven't seen the size of my shoulders you will soon, but I am not speaking about the physical image of my shoulders. I am speaking about the tenacity I am building this company with. I am built for this. I don’t want my little nieces and nephews to have to fight as I’ve fought. It is because of them that I do what I do.
I have never taken a selfie until now, I thought this would be an appropriate opportunity, plus I was forced to ;) Selfie #1 with neice and newphew 2-17-2018