Jeffrey Buchanan and I shot each other a glance. We could barely conceal the amazed looks on our faces.

We were listening to Sonia Pierre, a tall, slender black woman who was born in the Dominican Republic. But Pierre’s parents came from Haiti, which is on the western part of the island of Hispaniola shared by both countries. Pierre was talking about the racial classifications in the Dominican Republic.

“There is white, light Indian, dark Indian, trigeno — the color of cinnamon,” Pierre said. “There’s no recognition of Afro descent. What is black is Haitian.”

Pierre’s brief description of the bizarre racial situation in the Dominican Republic -- and “bizarre” might be too kind a word -- is what stunned me and Buchanan. I’m a 55-year-old black columnist. Buchanan is a young, white graduate of Johns Hopkins University. But we were both shocked to learn that there is at least one country with an even more wacky racial problem than our own.

Buchanan is the information officer for the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial. Every year, the organization gives out the RFK Human Rights Award. Pierre was the 2006 winner for her work in advocating for the rights of Haitian immigrants and Haitians born in the Dominican Republic. Pierre’s winning of the RFK Human Rights Award gets my vote for the most-ignored news story of 2006.

A Lexis Nexis search revealed only four stories about Pierre in 2006, Two ran after she won the award, two before. Compare that to the hundreds of stories that ran about the plight of illegal immigrants in the United States.

Americans have had their humps busted lately about the supposedly disgraceful way we treat illegal immigrants, especially Latinos. But would any of those Latino illegal immigrants in the United States want to trade places with Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic? I think not. Those Latinos wouldn’t even want to swap places with native Dominicans who have Haitian ancestry.

Pierre, who was 43 when she received the RFK Human Rights Award in late November, was born on a batee in the Dominican Republic (A batee is a sugar plantation.). It was Haitian immigrants — documented and  undocumented — who mainly worked those plantations. As she was growing up, Pierre saw how the Dominican plantation owners would treat the migrant Haitian workers “like their property.” She saw how those same owners and plantation supervisors would select the prettier Haitian women as sex slaves.

She remembers the Dominican field guards -- a veritable police force -- who “were very repressive and very anti-Haitian.” Seeing these abuses led Pierre to her first foray into political activism -- encouraging, at the age of 13, her fellow workers to strike.

These days Pierre uses her activism to fight for immigrant and citizenship rights for Haitian-Dominicans. Her mother, who’s lived on the same batee since 1951, can’t get legal documentation and still has to hide when Dominican government officials conduct deportation sweeps. In 1997, Pierre took up the case of two girls of Haitian descent who were born in the Dominican Republic who couldn’t get birth certificates and other documents showing that they were Dominican citizens, even though the law of the land says they are.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled in 2005 that the Dominican Republic systematically denies Dominicans of Haitian descent citizenship based on race. Pierre received threats after the decision. The wording of the threats is most revealing.

“You that are trying to make our country blacker,” one caller said, “your children are going to pay for it.” The threat was made against Pierre’s four children.

“It’s evident that this situation happens because of racism,” Pierre said.

That “r” word is something most black Americans refuse to use unless we’re talking about white folks in America. We rarely, if ever, use it about other “people of color.” We assume that other “people of color” are cool with us, just because they’re “people of color.”

Pierre, growing up in the Dominican Republic, can’t afford such delusions. She knows the grief mixed-race black folks have given full-blooded black folks. And, being a descendant of Haitian parents, she probably knows the reverse is true.

There’s a story about how Toussaint Louverture, the Haitian slave who successfully led black armies to defeat Spanish, French and British expeditionary forces, asked his general Jean Jacques Dessalines why he had massacred both whites and mulattoes.

“I couldn’t tell the difference,” Dessalines is said to have answered.

It’s that kind of bad blood that feeds the racism in the Dominican Republic today. I tip my hat to Pierre for daring to speak out about it.