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.

It was the first time my otherwise quiet mother encouraged us to get mad and express our anger. Until that point, she was adamant that we ignore the bullies at school who had been beating us up and taunting us by saying we had AIDS. My mom gathered all six of us children into our living room to make signs. When I wanted to know what I should put on my sign, she asked me what I would say to the bullies at school. I wrote, "I don't have AIDS!" in big block letters.

At city hall, we were swallowed into a crowd of thousands of Haitians waving signs and screaming demands for justice. The energy was contagious. I felt part of something bigger and knew other people shared my feelings. I imagined myself with the people I was reading about in school: Dr. King and all the other civil rights activists, their arms locked, singing "We Shall Overcome." When the CDC removed Haitians from the list of high-risk groups, I understood what people could do when they came together for a common cause.

I walked away from that rally with a renewed sense of pride in being Haitian and a desire to be politically active. In college, I began working on issues of sexual assault and domestic violence in immigrant communities. But the more I became active politically around issues of sexuality and race, the less my parents and grandparents understood my motivations.

My parents think of themselves as immigrants. They have experienced racism, but they see that through the lens of anti-immigrant discrimination. They identify as Haitian, not as Black. I have had a different experience. While I came of age surrounded by people who were fiercely proud to be Haitian and who instilled that pride in me, I came to understand that pride in the context of being both Haitian and Black. I made connections between anti-Haitian sentiments and racism against people of color because the language of civil rights that I learned in school and from other activists was grounded in a U.S. history of struggle against racism.

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Being Black and immigrant means that I cannot separate those two identities. Trying to explain these connections to my family, however, was difficult. After all, the bullies I had faced at school were more often than not other Black and brown children.

As I made my way through college, talking about "the man" and the plight of Black and brown folks, my mom and dad were focused on my grades. They were supportive and would often tell others, "Barbara se Africane," which was to say, I was into all that Black Power stuff. But it was something they hoped I would outgrow, along with my dredlocks, when I left school and entered "the real world."

Making Connections

My parents and grandparents immigrated to the United States to create a better life for us, and my older siblings chose career paths that fit their model of success. My oldest brother works in corporate America, my oldest sister is in medicine, and the other had no problem explaining her Masters degree in education. My decision to get a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies so I can write and teach about the African Diaspora and race relations in the U.S. makes less sense to my family including my grandmother. But it was my childhood experiences that led me to think about the historical relationship between Black Americans and Haitians in the formation of Black liberation movements of the '50s and '60s. Black writers and artists used Haiti as a theme in their works, which had a direct impact on the formation of Black liberation. Because discrimination against Haitians is aligned with racism against all people of color, the pride my parents instilled in me around being Haitian translated easily to the fight against racism, the fight for immigrant rights and the rights of incarcerated people. But that trajectory makes less sense to my grandmother, who does not have a direct relationship to the history of civil rights in the U.S. context. My grandmother was not marching in Washington with Dr. King. There are many people of color--immigrant and native--who didn't get involved politically in the '60s, even if 40 years later their kids and grandkids are involved politically. Instead, grandma has made community in Haiti, Florida and Boston and lives in all three places. She's a globetrotter, even though she would never use that word.

I have worked to find a language to explain those things to my mother and grandmother in ways that make sense. They still call California another country and tell me to come home. But they also understand that I am doing something I care about. Last year, when my grandmother announced to a guest that I was going to be the first doctor in the family, I did not feel the same sense of desperation. She smiled at me and said, "Why don't you explain your crazy degree?"

Barbara Ceptus is a research associate at the Applied Research Center. She is working toward her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at UC Davis.