All the Women are White, All the Black People are African American, But Some of Us Stay: Assemblages of Social, Cultural, and Sacred Knowledge Among Haitian LDS Women

Abstract

In 1965, the passage of the Hart-Celler Act provided a pathway for Black immigrants to enter the United States on a scale larger than previous years. Their presence not only shifted the ethnic landscape of “Black” identity in the U.S. but also, the religious landscape of what was normatively accepted as “Black Religion” in America. Recent studies are attuned to these shifts in the United States’ Black religious landscape but have yet to fully cross the bounds of Black immigrants in Christian communities at the periphery of the Black religious imagination such as Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Latter-day Saints. In this dissertation, I home in on one such group, Haitian Latter-day Saint women, who live their lives at the intersection of a number of historical as well as contemporary discourses. These discourses – which I frame as knowledge – give shape to ideas about womanhood, Blackness, as well as Christian and American identity. At the same time, Haitian LDS women cultivate and disseminate their own renderings of knowledge about these ideas. Using the Haitian concept of rasanblaj, I trace the negotiation of social, cultural, and sacred forms of knowledge among first, 1.5, and second-generation Haitian Latter-day Saint women with affiliations to Utah. I argue that these negotiations among the women in this study contribute to their understanding of themselves as Haitian Latter-day Saint women in their racial, ethnic, and religious communities. These understandings are vital to the ways they experience the United States and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In both places, however, they are subject to antiblackness and misogynoir. In these experiences of alienation, Haitian LDS women turn to alternative communal practices, such as developing their relationship with God and creating communities, to survive – and thrive – in the world.