Anti-Haitian stereotypes in three Dominican daily newspapers: a content analysis

Abstract

ABSTRACT Anti-Haitian attitudes are widely acknowledged to exist in the Dominican Republic, but it has not been clear whether these are driven by anti-Black, anti-immigrant, or specifically anti-Haitian stereotypes. We conduct a quantitative content analysis of a disproportionally stratified probability sample from the universe of all articles containing the search term ‘Haiti’ that appeared in the online versions of the three main Dominican daily newspapers, El Listín Diario, Hoy, and El Caribe from 2013 to 2015. In each article, we counted references to anti-Black stereotypes, anti-immigrant stereotypes (regardless of race), and stereotypes of criminal violence that are common to both anti-Black as well as anti-immigrant stereotypes. We also distinguish specifically anti-Haitian stereotypes based on the Dominican Republic’s historical experience of Haitian invasion and occupation, portraying Haitians as attackers or invaders. We find the strongest stereotype consistency bias in the domain of crime and violence. This finding is consistent with the predominance of either anti-Black bias or anti-immigrant bias, evidence for which differs from one newspaper to another. There is surprisingly little to no evidence of the predominance of stereotypes that are particular to Haitian-Dominican relations. We discuss the implications of our findings for mainstream and revisionist approaches to Dominican history and sociology.