Grief, Dominican independence, and Catholic colonialism

I am writing this essay two days after the Dominican celebration of our separation from Haiti on February 27, 1844. And a week after Ash Wednesday.

(Photo by Àlex Folguera on Unsplash)

I have been writing some version of this essay since last Lent.

I left my second full-time editorial job two months after my 10th anniversary in Catholic media. The reason was the same reason I left my first job: I believe these publications are racist, misogynistic, transphobic, and dangerously committed to upholding white supremacist, patriarchal power.

My work in media was grounded in the rhetoric these publications use publicly. I believed they were liberatory and inclusive spaces authentically pro-life, ministry, and mission-driven. I thought they were committed to truthtelling and protecting and supporting Black and Brown women. They were not.

I spent 10 years writing or working full or part-time in Catholic publications. In these spaces, white Catholic women and men watched as other women of color and I were ridiculed, undermined, underpaid, harassed, gaslit, and traumatized.

I had to fight for every Black writer who did not think like the men and women on these editorial teams; for every story that rejected the narrative that to be Catholic in the United States is to be white. It took me a long time to leave these spaces, and it has taken me years—and a pandemic and countless conversations with comrades and therapy—to write about my experiences.

It is not easy to write about racialized trauma, especially when harm happens in religious spaces.

I was afraid to write about how my work, body, and social media were surveilled. I was told Black, Christian women writers and thinkers "were unicorns." I was told my lack of baptism was "something that needed to be fixed immediately" to call myself Catholic, as if the faith does not vary across our diaspora.

How I and other women of color needed to have "some grace" when calling out misogyny. How we were discouraged from centering our lived experiences in our writing and reporting on systemic oppression.

I was angry for months.

***

Sometimes my rage becomes grief; sometimes, I feel a mix of both.

I thought healing from racial trauma was linear and straightforward, yet it is messy as fuck. This work requires letting go and naming, confronting, and loving all the messy, ugly, and uncontrollable parts of myself and this journey.

I am not good at any of that, and often my therapy sessions involve me asking my therapist just what, exactly, does feeling…..feel like? 

Slowly I am learning to let go of the fear and shame I carried.

In an essay for Amaka Studio, titled "On Ceeb Culture and Refusal," writer Najma Sharif features the stories of Somali women in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom and discusses shame (ceeb) culture. The women discuss their stories of sexual and domestic abuse, how Somali women call out abuse, and how they care for themselves in a world that often ignores the harm they experience.

Sharif discusses the role of shame in abuse, including the physical toll it takes on Somali women. "Shame is the tool used to enforce traditional cultural norms, gender roles and the power dynamics meant to police our behavior and actions. This demand for conformity especially harms queer and gender nonconforming Somalis," she writes.

Understanding how our oppressors have used shame and fear against us is crucial.

How both are used to abuse and gaslight us into silence. Yet how our present—as my comrade Siddika reminds me—is grounded in the resistance of Black and Indigenous women, children, and men who experienced the most violent weaponization of Christian shame and fear, and how our past and present, all our stories and histories and lived experiences, connect to building a free world.

What responsibility do we have to this history and to an abolitionist future?

***

I am writing this essay two days after the Dominican celebration of our separation from Haiti, after 23 years, on February 27, 1844. And a week after Ash Wednesday.

I am reading two books on Haitian and Dominican history: The Dominican Republic: A National History by Frank Moya Pons and Haiti: The Breached Citadel by Patrick Bellegarde-Smith. They discuss the evolution of both countries, from our Taino inhabitants to the formation of the modern-day Dominican Republic and Haiti, and how foreign and colonialist (and imperialist) influences have directly impacted how both populations relate.

In The Breached Citadel's second chapter, Bellegarde-Smith describes foreign intervention in Haiti in the 18th century and Spanish and French rule over the Haiti-D.R. border in the 19th century, including its role in Haitian troops invading Dominican cities in 1805. He writes:

Haiti invaded the Dominican Republic several times after it was created, primarily as the result of national security imperatives and, less importantly, because of endogenous conditions such as land pressure. These repeated Haitian invasions created a legacy of hostility between the two nations, which helped lead to the 1937 massacre of as many as 30,000 Haitians during the rule of Dominican President Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.

To better understand Haitian and Dominican history also means understanding the Catholic Church's presence in the Americas.

The church was one of the largest slaveholding institutions in the Americas and is deeply linked to the start of colonialism in the 1400s and, subsequently, deeply connected to capitalism. To this today, the church is estimated to own over 5,000 properties worldwide and over 100 million acres.

I learned about the church's complicity in chattel slavery thanks to the scholarship of Dr. Shannen Dee Williams. Her work focuses on Black Catholicism and African American history, in particular, the role of women religious in Black liberation work. She is a history professor at the University of Dayton and the author of Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle.

Last week, Dr. Williams and I were the keynote speakers at this year's Black Experience Summit at Elms College. We each discussed our books, both researched for years but finished and published following the uprisings of 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic. In her talk, titled "Bearing Witness to a Silenced Past: The Power and Challenge of Black Catholic Women's Historical Truthtelling," and in her book, she squarely places the anti-racist work of Black Catholic women, in particular, religious, in the history of U.S. freedom fighters.

"So much of African-American history takes place within Catholic boundaries," Dr. Williams stated. She talked about Black Catholic history and abolitionist anti-racist work. "Black Catholic sisters are freedom fighters," she said, "Black Catholics are not a footnote in the church's history." Most of the Catholic Church in the Americas, she added, comprises Black and Indigenous Catholics.

Dr. Williams' work is pivotal. It is the first to trace the anti-racist, liberation work of African-American Catholic sisters, their role in civil rights movements, and how the misogyny they faced is squarely rooted within a church built in the Americas through colonialist violence, including the church's application of the Doctrine of Discovery. She discussed the birth of Black Catholic history in Florida and linked it to the rise of fascism in the state today and the Haitian struggle.

Her work helps us to better understand the explicit link between the Catholic Church and human enslavement in the Americas, how the church profited off Black labor, and how each of its institutions in the Americas descends from it. It can also help us imagine and understand our histories outside of a white, colonialist, patriarchal, imperialist, Catholic lens.

Dr. Williams reminded the audience: "The greatest responsibility of the historian is to tell the story that has never been told."

What does thinking and writing about the diaspora responsibly and accountable to our communities mean? What does learning our past mean, and how does it connect to what we see today? How can it inform our community-building and decolonial work?