Michel DeGraff

Michel DeGraff
Michel DeGraff
	Michel DeGraff
Born	1963; Haiti
Alma mater	University of Pennsylvania
Known for	Arguing that Haitian Creole is a full-fledged language; Advocacy for the language of instruction in Haiti to be Haitian Creole;
Awards	National Science Foundation $1 Million Grant to promote teaching of Science in Haiti in Haitian Creole
	Scientific career
Fields	Linguistics Syntax Morphology Language Change Creole Studies Haitian Creole, Education in Haiti Linguistics-Ideology Interface
Institutions	M.I.T.
Thesis	Creole grammars and acquisition of syntax: The case of Haitian
Website	web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/degraff/index.html

Michel Frederic DeGraff^[2] is a Haitian creolist who has served on the board of the Journal of Haitian Studies.^[3] He is a tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology^[3] and a founding member of the Haitian Creole Academy.^[4] His fields of scholarship are Creole studies and the role of language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation.^[3] He is known for his advocacy towards the recognition of Haitian Creole as a full-fledged language.^[3] In the fall of 2012, he received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to introduce online Creole language materials in the teaching of STEM in Haiti.^[3] He believes that Haitian children should be taught in their native language at all levels of instruction, contrary to the tradition of teaching them in French.^[5] DeGraff believes that instruction in French, a foreign language for most Haitian children, hinders their creativity and their ability to excel.^[5] DeGraff is co-founder and co-director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative, founding member of Akademi Kreyòl Ayisyen and fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.

Early life

As a child growing up in a middle-class Haitian family and attending a top school where the instruction was in French, Degraff reports that despite being a top student, he often felt that French was a hindrance as not speaking it well caused complexes of inferiority among otherwise bright children.^[5] He remembers believing that he spoke one and a half languages, Haitian Creole being the "half", when in fact the language that all children spoke well by default was Creole.^[5] He recalls that French, although imposed at home and at school, was never used for jokes or on the soccer field.^[5]

Education

Professor Michel DeGraff holds a 1992 PhD in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania, with a dissertation on the role of language acquisition in the formation of the syntax of Haitian Creole.^[6] Prior to his PhD, he studied computer science at City College of New York.^[6] He arrived at City College from Haiti in 1982.^[6] He developed an interest in linguistics during an internship at Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1985, as a Summer Intern at AT&T Bell Laboratories' Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence department.^[6] So it can be said that DeGraff entered linguistics through the "backdoor" so to speak.

Work in Haiti

Today, Michel's research contributes to an egalitarian approach to Creole, Indigenous and other non-colonial languages and their speakers, as in his native Haiti. In addition to linguistics and education, his writings engage intellectual history and critical race theory, especially the links between power-knowledge hierarchies and the hegemonic (mis)representations of non-colonial languages and their speakers in the Global South and beyond. His work is anchored in a broader agenda for human rights and social justice, with Haiti as one spectacular case of a post-colony where the national language spoken by all (Haitian Creole) is systematically disenfranchised, even in certain scholarly traditions, while the (former) colonial language (in this case, French), spoken by few in Haiti, is enlisted for socio-economic, political and geo-political domination. Such devalorization of Haitian Creole (Kreyòl) and other non-colonial languages worldwide, especially among Black and Brown people, is embedded in long entrenched patterns of structural racism and white supremacy whereby language and education are enlisted as tools for (neo-)colonialism from within and from without. Michel tackles these political challenges heads-on. As he enlists language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation, he unveils age-old myths about Creole languages in linguistics and beyond, and he engages, through the MIT-Haiti Initiative, in a broad campaign for democratizing access to quality education and for the universal respect of human rights. Through the strategic use of Open Education Resources in Kreyòl, Platfòm MIT-Ayiti effectively sets up a model for oppressed communities to constructively enlist their native languages and cultures as tools for quality education and for inclusion in all other spheres where knowledge and power are created and transmitted. Really, language is a powerful tool for decolonization and liberation, as it is for colonization and domination!

Political Views

Prof. DeGraff's academic work is rooted in his passion for promoting language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation, especially in his native Haiti and in other Creole-speaking communities and other communities where language is weaponized for socio-economic and political domination. With the start of the war on Gaza, DeGraff has written in support of universal justice and freedom for Israelis an Palestinians alike "from the river to the sea".^[7] He has compared the liberation struggles of Haiti and Palestine. He also examined the role of language in masking MIT's leadership's stance on Gaza protests and counter-protests.