Standing on His Shoulders: What I Learned about Race, Life, and High Expectations from My Haitian Superman Father

In this funny, touching, and poignant memoir, David J. Malebranche celebrates the lessons he learned from his father, a Haitian physician who immigrated to the United States in the 1960s.

Malebranche provides a counter narrative to the current focus on absentee fathers in Black communities across the country, chronicling the ways his relationship with his father morphed, evolved, and ultimately grew stronger throughout his life. As a young child, Malebranche believed his father to be omnipotent, a larger-than-life superhero. It wasn’t until he became a teenager and experienced the usual adolescent angst about parents that he realized significant culture differences and divergent belief systems could profoundly exacerbate the tensions in his relationship with his father and cause their views of each other to change drastically. Despite the wide gap between their worldviews and lived experiences, both Malebranche and his father remained committed to finding a way to accept and respect one another. Today, Malebranche can look at his father-and at the enduring lessons about life he received from him-and say that he once more sees his father as a true hero.