My alma mater, Hamilton College, prides itself on its motto of “know thyself.” I don’t know about other alumni, but I certainly know that my time there taught me not only to know, but also to name myself.

I remember in my first year of college we talked about naming in two of my favorite classes: Introduction to Africana Studies and Queers of Color. In those discussions I learned how different groups had been stripped of their power and named by another, and how they took on different names to reclaim that power.

Among my peers who were predominantly white and wealthy, I found it crucial to my survival to have others refer to me using the language I had claimed for myself. It was with this mentality that I approached my study abroad experience. 

Needless to say, I had to make some adjustments as I circumnavigated the globe over the course of a year, making stops in Spain, Vietnam, South Africa, and Argentina. In the United States I had grown accustomed to labeling myself as Haitian. Growing up in Miami, the American city with the largest percentage of foreign-born residents, it was not uncommon to hear people saying “I was born here, but I’m {insert nationality here}”. There, my answer to the question “where are you from?” was always “Haiti.”

This answer changed slightly when I made my way to the frigid north. It became “I was born in Haiti, but I grew up in Miami.” But then, when I spent four months studying abroad in Spain, I found my answers changing depending on my desire (or lack thereof) to speak to the person asking the question, the people surrounding me, and a host of other factors.

I should mention, too, that my first time using an American passport was on my way to Spain. I got American citizenship at age 18, and before that I always used my Haitian passport when travelling. When returning to the States, I was all too familiar with waiting in line for eons with other non-US passport holders. And so it was quite the change to be in the express line when coming back.

Throughout my travels I consistently found that people used the language they had access to in order to describe me. In Spain, when I was alone, most people would think I was Dominican or Equatorial Guinean. But then, when I was surrounded by my white peers in my study abroad program, I was quickly grouped in with them as American.

Something about this felt uncomfortable to me. It struck me as odd that I was only American away from American soil. And knowing that many generations of Haitians before me could not claim the identity for fear of discrimination, I fiercely clung on to the label. At first, I would correct them and say “I live in the United States, but I’m Haitian.”

At my internship in Spain, my boss would refer to me as “yankee.” I didn’t mind being labelled as a non-Spaniard, but it was the label of “American” that rubbed me the wrong way. When this happened I felt a deep sense of erasure. I tried to explain that, just as Spain had many immigrants from other countries, the United States too had immigrants from all over the world. 

As I continued my travels, my thought process around the naming of my nationality (as well as other parts of my identity) started to evolve. It was true that I wasn’t used to referring to myself as American, not even using the hyphenated Haitian-American. I’ve only started using the label within the last year.But  I was never really opposed to being American per se, I just knew that legally speaking, that wasn’t the case. And so I claimed the country that claimed me.

But our identities, and especially the privileged ones, are so much more complex than what we claim. How we navigate the world is dually and simultaneously constituted by what we know about ourselves, as well as what others feel they know about us. I was American abroad not only because I had lived as a Haitian in America, but because I wielded a passport that came with a history. That history allowed me to access countries with an ease that my Haitian passport could not grant.

  In spite of being born in a country that suffered at the hands of the United States, I  was still benefiting from U.S. imperialism and my American passport was only a symbol of that. As I made my way from country to country, I was less uncomfortable with being labelled as American because I grew to understand that it wasn’t a negation of my very real struggles as a Haitian immigrant. In terms of the space that I occupied in those countries, I was in fact American. And my nationalities, just like my other identities, are multiple. I knew this even though others didn’t. And I knew they couldn’t. 

This process of being able to speak about my privilege as an American is one I like to compare to being able to speak about white-passing privilege. American isn’t who I am in my totality, it’s what I can be. Similarly, whiteness may not encompass the entirety of someone’s racial identity, but white is something that my white-passing peers can be. And when it comes to the material advantages granted by Americanness and whiteness, how institutions name us can outweigh how we name ourselves.

In reality, it doesn’t matter if I identify as American. What does matter is that I have the passport-privilege of being an American. Make no mistake, this of course intersects with my many other identities. How I’m perceived as a black American-passing woman abroad is entirely different from how a white American man is perceived. 

And there are points in time where my Americanness is the least salient of my identities and I feel totally marginalized. In Vietnam, for example, people would stare at me wherever I went and take pictures-oftentimes without my permission. (And in South Africa, people would similarly other my Asian classmates) In those moments, they were not looking at an American. They were looking at a black person.