An Australian-issued drivers license specifies your driving conditions, like wearing glasses and the vehicle classification permitted. A USA license will specify your gender, height, weight, eye and hair colour, as it doubles as an ID.
And in the Dominican Republic, the state will also classify your skin colour: white (blanco), light indigenous (indio claro), dark indigenous (indio oscuro), almost black (moreno) or black (negro).
Since Rafael Trujillo's dictatorship in the DR, skin colour has been used to define the nation against 'the other'; its only border is with Haiti, whose rural poor are 'black' and speak creole not Spanish. That means the first four skin colour categories are for Dominicans ... and the last likely means society will brand you as Haitian.
Perhaps no 'nation' is more imagined than the Dominican: two of the categories refer to indigenous Tainos who had died out — or been killed off — within 30 years of 'The Discovery' of the Americas by Columbus in 1492.
However, the terms were reintroduced and European immigration and eugenics encouraged during Trujillo's repressive regime to 'create' a predominantly mulatto people, superior to their 'black' neighbours. The majority of Dominicans fall into the three middle categories.
Understanding the Dominican 'pigmentocracy' is especially relevant now, on the 75th anniversary of the worst peace time human rights abuse of civilians in the Americas during the 20th century (28 September–4 October).
In 1937, Trujillo ordered the massacres of Haitians in DR border regions, to promote 'nationalism', assert sovereignty, and control specific strategic and economic resources. Figures are debated, but not the brutality: 10–20,000 men, women, elderly, children and babies were butchered with machetes, shot, or thrown to sharks.
The victims were identified by their skin colour, and then by their creole pronunciation; but historians have also shown victims from English colonies.
Yet although many massacred were Haitians working in the DR, many others were born there and legally were Dominicans. Racism was the primary mechanism in the massacres; all victims were equally 'black' to the vicious murderers, who were released from jail and directed by the military to kill.
The massacres are central to history and culture on both sides of the border. But they are not commemorated by Dominican state or society; instead they are justified by