Some Thoughts on Growing Up Black & Caribbean in the US

The initial title for this post was “To Be Doubly Dispersed.” I finally decided against it thinking that it might be too esoteric of an allusion to the African diasporas – dispersions – of which I am a part. My grandmother, Shirley, and my mother, Patricia immigrated to the US in 1968 and 1970, respectively from Trinidad & Tobago. My older brother, Alex, and I are the first US-born generation in our family. Much of my worldview, including how I think about and experience my blackness, continues to be shaped by the distinct ways that African culture was distilled in these communities.

After living and working abroad, I have come to realize how beneficial of an experience it has been to occupy these three distinct but often converging roles: that of being a US citizen in the world, of being a black man in the US, and of coming from foreign roots in a black American population that largely traces its roots to the southern states. I am aware of the power that I wield when I travel around developing countries with a US passport. Coming from a traditionally oppressed group in the US I find that viscerally I am sympathetic to populations on the unfortunate end of some of our foreign policy decisions. That is, I understand myself in relation to those people in a way that I imagine is different from many of my compatriots. The majority of my family, on their small, oil-rich island nation, is, after all, subject to US foreign policy.

Despite the rewards of this diversity, I have lived with a persistent – but not ever-present – sense of dislocation. This may be a shared experience among first generation Americans, but I have never been able to fully escape the feeling of being neither American enough, nor Caribbean enough to not feel as though one or the other part of me was not setting me apart from whichever group I was trying to blend in to. After all, my grandmother still calls me “Yankee boy,” and my friends always seem to catch the slight change in my accent when I talk to someone from the English-speaking Caribbean.

There is a limit to what we can absorb during our most formative years. When one is drawing upon several traditions – each one diverse in its own right – one is bound to miss many bits of cultural knowledge and experience. In my case, these lost opportunities can manifest themselves in minor, at times comical, confessions. To my black American friends, I might note that I still cannot play spades, and that it took me 19 years of life on this planet before I ate a single fiber of collard greens. (Have a black friend explain.) On the other hand, I am terrible at all the Trinidadian card games that my grandmother taught me growing up – and my cousins enjoy reminding me of that. Individually, this sort of thing is not devastating, but taken together with similar occurrences, I quickly began to realize growing up that my blackness was taking on a slightly different flavor than the groups by which I had been influenced.

Dwayne David Paul, Asst. Director of Campus Ministry, G.O. coordinator