Wikipedia
Black is part of a racial classification system in the Dominican Republic,
The census bureau decided to not use racial classification in the 1970 census. The Dominican identity card (issued by the Junta Central Electoral) used to categorised people as yellow, white, indian, and black, in 2011 the Junta planned to replace indian with mulatto in a new ID card with biometric data that was under development, but in 2014 when it released the new ID card, it decided to just drop racial categorisation, the old ID card expired on 10 January 2015. The Ministry of Public Works and Communications uses racial classification in the driver’s license, being white, mestizo, mulatto, black, and yellow the categories used.
Black is applied to Dominicans of full or predominant Black African ancestry, which is represented by 4.26% of the Dominican population, according to the leaked 1996 electoral census based on Dominican identity cards data, or by 10.9% of the Dominican population, according to the 1960 population census (the last one in which race was queried).
Most Black Dominicans descend from West Africans and Central Africans (almost the half of them were Kongo, with other important ethnicities being the Mandingo, the Igbo people from the regions of Calabar and Biafra, and people captured near the São Jorge da Mina castle), who arrived from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century as a result of slavery, while many others descend from immigrants who came from the United States during the 19th century or from the Lesser Antilles during the 20th century.
Currently there are also many black immigrants, particularly from Haiti, who can be included within the Afro-Dominican demographics if they were born in the country or have Dominican naturalization.
Black Dominicans make up a significant minority of the country's population, but there is a lack of recent official data and it is not possible to quantify their numbers because the National Office of Statistics (ONE) does not collect racial data since 1960 because of the race taboo and " political correctness" that originated after the fall of Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship; though the Central Electoral Board still collected racial data until 2014. According to a 2011 survey by Latinobarómetro, 26% of the Dominicans surveyed identified themselves as black.