The New Yorker:

The history of Haitian immigration to the United States is that of politicians on both sides of the aisle fighting to keep Haitians out of the country, with equal cruelty.

By Roxane Gay

When my brothers and I were growing up in Omaha, Nebraska, in the nineteen-eighties, we were the only Black kids at our school, let alone the only Haitian Americans. This wasn’t a problem until it was. Sometimes, the other students asked why my parents “talked funny,” which my brothers and I didn’t really understand, because we only heard the lilting cadences of their voices. There was a period when my youngest brother’s classmates touched his hair, because it was tightly curled, but he was light-skinned, and they couldn’t quite figure out what that meant. When my brother shared this with my mother, she called the school principal, who agreed to let her visit my brother’s class. She brought our globe, spun it around to show the kids where Haiti was, and told them about our culture. She made plantain chips, which, of course, the kids devoured. And after that they stopped touching my brother’s hair and understood a bit more about the world around them. Unfortunately, it is rare that someone has the opportunity—and the grace—to educate the ill-informed.

That newfound understanding of Haitian culture did not last long. When I was in second or third grade, and H.I.V./aids began to ravage the gay community in the United States, a narrative emerged that Haiti was the origin of epidemics and a hotbed of disease, an island plagued. My brothers and I were classified by our peers as high-risk, by nature of our ethnicity. Kids would ask us if we had aids and if we were going to die. They worried that they were going to catch whatever diseases we were carrying by being overly proximal. It was childish ignorance fuelled by something much more sinister: misinformation and bigotry they were learning from adults. Throughout the years, there were other Haitian-related taunts—about “HBO” (too infantile to explain) and about the age-old tale of Haiti’s extreme poverty and people eating mud cakes. The way people understood and weaponized our Haitian identity was hurtful, and then it was annoying, and then we mostly became accustomed to the various stigmas, factoring it in as the cost of freedom.

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