Growing up Haitian, growing up black: being black and immigrant means that I cannot separate those two identities. Trying to explain these connections to my family, however, was difficult.

I was standing in my grandmother's kitchen trying to explain why I wanted to move across the country for a Ph.D. program in Cultural Studies, when I realized there was no word in Haitian Creole for doctoral degree--at least not one that I knew. Even if I could translate doctoral degree, I had no words for interdisciplinary and cultural studies. My grandmother speaks very little English, and neither one of us speaks any French, so Creole was our only option.

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I pulled together bits and pieces of my native tongue to come up with this explanation: I was going to school to become a doctor, but not a real (read: medical) doctor, but a doctor of philosophy, but not one that studies philosophy. I was going to study culture. Not all culture, but African-American culture. When she asked why I wanted to do this, I told her that I wanted to teach and write books. My grandmother nodded, giving me that perplexed look that said, "I don't understand, but I support you."

I walked away from that conversation feeling frustrated that I couldn't share an important decision with one of the most important people in my life. I was frustrated because I knew there was more than just a linguistic gap between my grandmother and myself. As I kid, I had run around the house reenacting the stories she told me about the Haitian revolution, screaming "koupe tet! brule cayes!" ("cut heads! burn houses!"). But as an adult actively engaged in social justice work, I now had few words in Creole to explain the things I was passionate about.

Haitian, Not Black

My family migrated to Boston from Haiti in 1984. Like many others leaving our economically depressed and politically unstable country, we came in search of better educational and economic opportunities. The 1980s proved to be a difficult time to be a Haitian immigrant. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) had labeled Haitians (along with homosexuals, hemophiliacs and heroin addicts) as a high-risk group in the mounting AIDS epidemic, and the Food and Drug Administration imposed a ban on all Haitian blood donors.

In response, my parents did not encourage assimilation. Instead, they became active in the thriving Haitian immigrant community of Boston. They insisted we speak Creole at home, join the local Haitian church and become active in our community to stay close to our Haitian roots. My parents, however, had never been politically active and actually discouraged it because they had lost friends to political violence in Haiti. But when the community in Boston organized a rally to have the CDC remove Haitians from the list of high-risk groups for HIV/AIDS carriers, my parents got involved. My mother took me and my siblings to a rally at city hall.