Why I’m leaving

America

14
 As a Black woman,
I want freedom
from oppression.
So I’m finally
plotting my exit.

STORY BY
DENEEN L. BROWN

ILLUSTRATIONS BY
DIANA EJAITA

T
he mouth of the Volta River in
Ghana seems to be swelling with
the stories of my people. By day,
the river, black and thick, runs
south, dumping its fresh water
into the Gulf of Guinea and
eventually the Atlantic Ocean,
where it churns in a powerful vortex. By night, I
swear I see the river reverse itself, running inland, as
if an invisible force were swallowing it whole. The
pink water lilies, with plump green leaves that
floated south that morning, appear to be moving
backward. It is magical and mysterious. I’ve never
witnessed a river reverse course. ¶ I believe this river
carries the stories of my enslaved African ancestors
who may have been transported down its waterway
hundreds of years ago into waiting boats anchored
out at sea before making the transatlantic voyage as
“human cargo,” heading from this Gold Coast for
South America, the Caribbean islands and other
parts of North America. As many as 15 million
Africans were packed in the belly of slave ships,
often without proper ventilation or sufficient food. It
is estimated that up to 2 million died in the Middle
Passage, lost in deep-water graves.
My ancestors, though I do not know them, must have survived
that gruesome voyage, only to have to endure the barbarity of
enslavement in the Americas. As with many people in the African
diaspora — scattered by the evil of the slave trade, disconnected
from our language, song, culture and people — I am not exactly
sure where my ancestors are from. Still, I know that my distant
ancestors are from this continent. As Peter Tosh sang, “Don’t care
where you come from / As long as you’re a Black man, you’re an
African / No mind your nationality / You have got the identity of
an African.”
In December 2021, I jumped on an airplane to reconnect with
the continent — and to explore Ghana as a potential place to live
and plant new roots. It was a time when America seemed to be
splintering, with state laws banning the teaching of critical race
theory — effectively, barring the teaching of historical truths —
and constant warnings about real dangers to democracy and the
possibility of a new civil war. Eleven months earlier, I had watched
as insurrectionists attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, scaling
walls, beating police officers with American flags, breaking
historic glass windows, bursting doors and trampling through a
building built by enslaved Black people. Someone erected a
16 OCTOBER 2, 2022
gallows and noose outside. One man carried a Confederate flag, a
symbol of entrenched racism, through the halls of Congress. The
fight for racial justice seemed to be failing. The moral floor had
cracked.
Democracy appeared to be imploding, and the country seemed
to be increasingly dangerous for Black people — although racist
terror was embedded in the fabric of American history and is not a
new phenomenon. In 1999, Amadou Diallo, a student, was shot 19
times by four New York police officers who were then acquitted of
all charges in his killing. In 2006, police shot Sean Bell the
morning of his wedding. In 2009, transit police fatally shot Oscar
Grant III in Oakland, Calif. In 2014, Michael Brown was fatally
shot by a police officer. Walter Scott was killed in 2015, Philando
Castile in 2016. In 2018, Stephon Clark was fatally shot in his
grandmother’s backyard. In 2020, George Floyd was murdered,
and Breonna Taylor was fatally shot while she slept in her bed. In
Kentucky, Charleston and Buffalo, self-proclaimed white su-
premacists attacked Black people in churches and grocery stores.
As a reporter for more than 35 years, I watched, researched and
wrote with a sense of journalistic distance while consuming the
emotions of every tragedy. Each video was so terribly sad. The
2019 police killing of Elijah McClain in Colorado ripped at my
core. I replayed the videos of McClain, 23, a peace-loving
vegetarian who played his violin to shelter cats, pleading for police
to stop hurting him and to just let him walk home in peace. We
couldn’t walk the streets, drive, study, go to the grocery store or
sleep without fear of getting killed.
One night while on my trip to Ghana, my driver made a U-turn
in traffic and was stopped by a police officer. My stomach
dropped. It was the middle of the night and I was terrified. I
watched as the driver got out of the car and walked toward the
officer standing on the side of the road. The driver motioned to the
officer, talking with his hands, explaining he was lost and
apologizing for making the U-turn. The officer listened. After a
pause, the officer said, “I forgive you. Go about your way.”
I want this kind of freedom: to live in a country where traffic
stops end peacefully. I want the ability to move among people who
look like me. I want to engage in intellectual debates without
having to explain the history of this country’s racism. I know no
place is perfect. But I want to live in a country where racism is not
a constant threat. Which is why I have decided to eventually leave
America. When or where I will go I can’t say for sure — but I am
finally ready.
I am not alone in my plot to leave the country where I was born in
an attempt to flee entrenched oppression. There is no official
tally of African Americans who have recently chosen to leave, but
anecdotally there has been a surge of interest in the topic.
Looking ahead to the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the
first enslaved African people on the shores of what is now Virginia,
Ghana’s president, Nana Akufo-Addo, issued a call to people in
the African diaspora to “return home” by visiting and moving to
Ghana. “In the Year of the Return, we open our arms even wider to
welcome home our brothers and sisters,” Akufo-Addo said in 2018
at the National Press Club in Washington, “in what will become a
birthright journey home for the global African family.”
For many, the death of Floyd in 2020 may have been a turning
point. “In the last two years, there has been a groundswell of Black
people in America who want to go to Africa,” says Greg Carr, a
professor of Africana studies and former chair of the Department
of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. “I haven’t made
the jump yet, but I’ve been thinking about it all the time. … I would
 prefer to experience the full range of human experiences on the
continent, rather than put up with the default position in the
United States, where we are ‘othered’ and excluded from the
definition of humanity. It is a perpetual field of violence.”
Celebrities have been part of this trend. In 2020, the singer and
actor Ludacris announced on Instagram that he had become a
citizen of Gabon, a country in central Africa. Actor Samuel L.
Jackson also became a citizen of Gabon after he took a DNA test
that showed he was connected to the country’s Benga tribe. “It was
spiritually uplifting to connect with the tribe and to look down and
see my relatives and ... to be welcomed by some people that looked
at me ... like, ‘Come home,’ ” Jackson told “The Daily Show” host
Trevor Noah. In 2021, singer Stevie Wonder announced he was
moving to Ghana. During an interview with Oprah Winfrey, he
explained that his decision was prompted by the recent political
climate in America: “I don’t want to see my children’s children’s
children have to say, ‘Oh, please like me. Please respect me. Please
know that I am important. Please value me.’ ”
The U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs says it
does not keep track of the number of Americans who have moved
out of the country. “U.S. citizens are not required to register their
presence abroad, and we do not maintain comprehensive lists of
U.S. citizens residing overseas,” a State Department spokesperson
wrote to me. “Estimates of U.S. citizens in particular countries can
vary and are constantly changing. We do not want to provide
figures that cannot be considered authoritative.”
But online, one can find growing communities that are sharing
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stories of what they sometimes call the Blaxit, i.e., Black Exit. The
YouTube channel GoBlack2Africa has posted dozens of videos
interviewing African Americans who’ve moved to Africa. A video
from the African Web YouTube channel titled “Why Are So Many
African Americans Moving to Ghana” has been viewed over
217,000 times.
In 2021, Tim Swain, a poet and educator who moved from
Indiana to Ghana, told the YouTube channel Odana Network that
the first time he visited Ghana in 2007, he was transformed “as a
Black person.” Then in 2014, he went to join peaceful protests in
Missouri after the police killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
The attacks on protesters left him shaken. A few months later, he
traveled to Ghana again. “It was like this juxtaposition of America
where I am feeling like the bottom of the bottom, reminded every
day that I’m a Black person that is a stain on the fabric of America,”
Swain recounted. “I come to Ghana where I literally exist as a
human being. I have no conscience about the color of my skin. …
Every time I came to Ghana it became literally harder and harder
to return to the U.S.” After about two years of planning, he and his
wife moved to Ghana in 2019.
Rashad McCrorey, who owns a travel company that organizes
tours to Africa, told BNC (“America’s Black News Channel”) that
he was traveling in Ghana in 2020 when the pandemic hit the
United States. He decided to stay. “It’s been an amazing experi-
ence,” he said. “In America, we deal a lot with racial oppression,
[systemic] oppression, whether it’s red lining ... the prison
industrial complex. But what I appreciate most about being in
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I want the ability to move among
people who look like me. I want
to engage in intellectual debates
without having to explain the
history of this country’s racism.

Writer DeNeen L. Brown at the former site of Fort Kongenstein in Ada Foah, Ghana, where enslaved Africans were traded.

18 OCTOBER 2, 2022
Africa is that I just wake up every day and being a man.”
Winthrope Wellington, 38, who runs Throp, a YouTube
channel that highlights economic business development in Ja-
maica, has interviewed African Americans who have recently
moved to the island. Wellington — whose father is Jamaican —
permanently moved from New York to Negril after college. Last
year, Wellington interviewed Rahel Teklegiorgis, a guest at his
family’s hotel who decided to move to Jamaica from Philadelphia
during the pandemic. “As a single Black female ... I felt welcomed.
That’s the beauty of the culture here,” Teklegiorgis told Welling-
ton. “Wherever I go, they’re like, ‘Empress!’ It’s just a beautiful
thing to feel welcomed and valued and held up. ... It’s like a breath
of fresh air. ... I would encourage folks to just try it. Take the first
step.”
After he posted the interview, Wellington noticed a theme in
the video’s comments. “I realized there was an underground
movement of people asking, ‘How can I, as a Black American,
move to a country where I don’t feel oppressed and automatically
judged by my skin color?’ ” Wellington told me. He added that
during Donald Trump’s presidency, “people were driven to my
channel. People were looking for a way out.” He also noted
another element that may be a key driver of the trend: In the age of
remote work, people can choose to live abroad without quitting
their jobs.
And yet, people have also been making this choice since before
the pandemic and George Floyd and the upheavals of the Trump
era. Mark E. Blanton, 53, a former U.S. Secret Service agent, and
his wife, LaTasha R. Blanton, 44, a doctor of physical therapy,
decided to move from their home in Virginia to South Africa after
visiting in 2011. “We saw beautiful homes, luxury homes,”
LaTasha told me of her first visit to South Africa. “We saw Black
people holding positions.” It made her think of all the work she
had put into her career in the United States without ever really
feeling as though she had quite arrived. In America, she recalls, “I
checked all the boxes they asked me to check: Go to school, get a
degree and at the end you would have a life where you don’t have to
worry as much. But it was never that.”
In 2018, they moved, resolving that “we should live out the rest
of our days around people who think like us, look like us and feel
the same way we feel about our accomplishments,” says LaTasha.
“When I first arrived in South Africa, that is when I realized I was
living.”
Mark and LaTasha now own the Real South Africa tourism
company, which is based in Johannesburg and introduces visitors
to life in the country. They have seen an increase in the number of
people booking tours. For many, the trip is an experience that
shifts their inner core. When their airplanes land, “everybody says
they felt something,” Mark told me.
Whenever Mark has to travel to the States, he sobs on his return
flight to South Africa. “It’s the feeling of freedom,” he explains. “I
don’t want to let it go, even for a moment. I love my freedom. I truly
do. You must understand the experience on this side as an African
American. … A lot of African Americans are figuring this thing
out. That is the biggest draw. They are getting their freedom.”
I never really felt at home in America, though I was born here
and grew up in Kansas and Oklahoma, in the midst of wheat
fields. As a child, I climbed trees, wrote poetry, devoured books
and dreamed of faraway places. I read National Geographic
magazines in the basement of the little white house on Ash Street.
I consumed the set of encyclopedias that my mother bought. I
watched trains crossing town near the smokestacks. I wondered
PHOTO: COURTESY OF DENEEN L. BROWN
where they were going. I wanted to get on those trains and leave.
Wanderlust — I would later understand the word. I carried with
me the desire to get out even then.
I look back now and realize I was a child in the middle of a social
revolution. I grew up in the Black Power movement, coming on
the tail end of the civil rights movement. I wore bell bottoms, cut
my hair into a short Afro and danced to Aretha Franklin’s
“Respect.” I “cut the rug” on the gold shag carpet in our living room
and sang James Brown’s “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud.”
My parents never told me what America thought of me — or
their own personal histories with race, racism and racists. It was a
coping mechanism used by so many Black parents across Ameri-
ca. Instead, they showed me I was loved. In our family’s
black-and-white photos, my sisters and I are perfectly groomed —
starched dresses, ribbons in our hair — and we are smiling. My
mother constantly told me: “Nene, you are beautiful. You are
smart. You can do anything. You can be anything you want to be.”
In first grade in 1971, I became part of a nationwide experiment
of transporting Black children into White schools to fulfill the U.S.
Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education. I was one
of thousands of Black students who would have to climb on yellow
school buses in our Black neighborhoods in the early-morning
hours and ride for as long as an hour, passing our own beloved
neighborhood schools.
On the first day that I was to attend the school across town, my
mother ironed my dress and pressed my hair and parted it down
the middle. I remember wearing clipped bangs. But still I was not
quite prepared for the encounter that day at Peterson Elementary
in Kansas, a flat blond brick building on the White side of town.
I remember during snack time the teacher assigned a White
girl to be the class monitor; she would check whether the students
had indeed washed their hands in preparation for graham
crackers and milk in tiny cartons. The girl circled the class. When
she arrived at my desk, I proudly stretched out my clean hands.
But the girl recoiled. “I can’t tell whether your hands are clean or
dirty,” she spat. “They are all brown.” I remember thinking: “What
the hell is wrong with you? Of course my hands are clean.” Even as
a child, I would not internalize the oppressor’s opinion of me.
Racism would always be their problem.
Despite the racism I faced, I excelled in the White schools. I was
a track star, a volleyball player, a debate team member and my
high school’s first Black head cheerleader. I had the biggest smile
and could do a standing leap four feet off the ground, as if I knew I
could fly. But I also suspected that my people’s stories and
contributions were being left out of my lessons, textbooks and
assignments. I remember asking my Advanced Placement history
teacher, a White woman: “Where are the Black people in our
textbooks?” She didn’t respond.
After winning an academic scholarship to a university, I
stumbled into journalism during my sophomore year when a
professor in an advertising-writing course saw my promise and
directed me on the editorial track. During my subsequent decades
as a journalist, my goal has been to humanize Black people,
capturing their ordinary and extraordinary lives. As a reporter in
D.C., I thought of myself as “a reporting anthropologist”: I sought
to capture the dialogue, rhythm and cadence of what was then
known as “Chocolate City.” The underlying questions driving my
reporting were: Why did racism persist in a country that claimed it
believed in equality and freedom? Why were Black people still
suffering under economic, political and cultural oppression?
At The Washington Post, I covered protests across the country
in the wake of police shootings and mass shootings of Black
THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 19
people. In 2015, I reported on the fatal shootings of nine Black
people in Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church
in Charleston. Dylann Roof had been welcomed by church
members for a prayer meeting on June 17, then spent more than
an hour praying with them before he pulled out a pistol and
opened fire. In the middle of the shooting, Tywanza Kibwe Diop
Sanders, 26, asked Roof, “Why are you doing this?” according to
the later testimony of his mother, Felicia Sanders. “And he told our
son, ‘I have to do this because y’all raping our women and taking
over the world,’ ” Felicia said. “And that’s when [the gunman] put
“When I first
five bullets in my son.”
I was assigned to attend seven of the nine funerals, including
arrived in South
the funeral of the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, where President
Barack Obama famously sang “Amazing Grace,” a cappella. I
reported with a sense of urgency, trying to connect history to the
Africa, that is
tragedy in the church. I drove past the old Confederate planta-
tions. I visited the Old Slave Mart Museum, which was the first
port for thousands of Africans brought here at the height of the
when I realized I
slave trade. During those days on the ground in Charleston, I
interviewed relatives of the people shot in that church. I inter-
was living,” says
viewed Black people. I interviewed White people. I interviewed
people standing in line to attend the funeral of Rev. Pinckney. I
interviewed people in the shade. I interviewed people who stood in
LaTasha R.
the sun. I interviewed people inside the funeral. No one could
answer the question of what drove this self-proclaimed racist to
open fire on nine Black people praying in a church.
Blanton, who
Then, later that year, I got an opportunity to interview Scott
Shepherd, who was a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in
relocated from
Mississippi and now called himself a “reformed racist.” There I
was, sitting outside a Georgetown cafe, traffic whizzing by, as he
told me about his past racism. “The plan for a race war is definitely
Virginia to
still there,” Shepherd said. “They want to start another civil war.
It’s people like Roof who’ve grown impatient waiting for the war. South Africa in
They break off and start shooting Black people.” He warned me
then to tell my “Black friends” to prepare for the war. That we
should stock up on food and ammunition. Better yet, he said,
2018.
perhaps we should leave America.
“They don’t like you because they hate themselves,” Shepherd
said of his former allies. What struck me about this interview was
his searing honesty; no White person had ever directly explained
the depths of racism to me. I kept the video on my phone so that I what to do as to the existing institution” of enslavement. “My first
could remember this conversation. impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia, to
their own native land.” In 1861, Lincoln came up with a plan to
n 2016, I worked on a team of reporters who established a send Black people to Panama, but abolitionists fought him.
I history section of The Post’s website called Retropolis. I
focused my reporting on Black people in American history and
On April 16, 1862, Lincoln signed the District of Columbia
Compensated Emancipation Act. The law abolished slavery in the
wrote short narratives, hoping to expose readers to stories they District and called for the payment of reparations to White
were never taught. I wrote about topics from the brutality of enslavers loyal to the Union, as much as $300 for each enslaved
enslavement, to Reconstruction, to the racist terror committed Black person freed, according to the National Archives. But a
against Black Americans during the Jim Crow era, to the search little-known clause in the act did something noteworthy: It
for mass graves of Black people killed during the Tulsa Race apportioned $100,000 to pay up to $100 to each enslaved person
Massacre. I was assigned to cover the unveiling of the lynching who voluntarily chose to emigrate out of the country.
museum in Montgomery, Ala. As I reported, I began to under- Months after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation on
stand the country’s history of racism at a deep level. I was not an Jan. 1, 1863, Lincoln’s administration contracted with two White
academic, but on this beat, as a reporter and a generalist, I began men in New York to send more than 450 recently emancipated
to connect the dots of America’s ugly past. It became clear that this Black people to Île-à-Vache, Haiti, where they would settle a
country had never fully embraced justice for formerly enslaved colony, according to manuscripts at the Library of Congress. On
Americans and their descendants. April 14, 1863, a ship named the Ocean Ranger left Fortress
I discovered that President Abraham Lincoln, known as the Monroe, Va., with 453 recently freed Black people. But the plan
Great Emancipator, was also known as the “Great Colonizer” soon turned into a catastrophe. Dozens of the passengers died of
because of his efforts to relocate Black people out of America. In malnutrition and disease. Less than year later, in March 1864, the
1854, during a speech in Illinois, Lincoln said, “I should not know United States sent a ship to rescue them, returning the emigres to

20 OCTOBER 2, 2022
the United States.
Still, Lincoln did not give up on plans to send Black people
away. “By 1863,” according to the National Archives, “realizing
Liberia, Haiti, and the Chiriquí lands were not reasonable for
resettlement (Liberia was considered too great a distance to
relocate a large number of freed slaves), Lincoln mentioned
moving the ‘whole colored race of the slave states into Texas.’ Four
days before his death, speaking to Gen. Benjamin Butler, Lincoln
still pressed on with deportation as the only peaceable solution to
America’s race problem: ‘I can hardly believe that the South and
North can live in peace, unless we can get rid of the negroes … I
believe that it would be better to export them all to some fertile
country.’ ”
Reading these documents, I understood what my history
teachers had not told me: that Lincoln believed this country would
never truly accept us.
ut it was not merely White politicians discussing this topic.
B Black intellectuals, philosophers and leaders have long
debated whether African Americans should be seeking to inte-
grate or to separate. In short: Should we go, or should we stay?
Marcus Mosiah Garvey, a national hero in Jamaica, was one of
the greatest proponents of Black people leaving America. In 1914,
he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which
advocated for racial uplift, Black pride, economic empowerment
and Black nationalism. Garvey championed the Back to Africa
movement, advocating for Black people scattered throughout the
world in the African diaspora to return to the continent and form
an independent Black nation.
Malcolm X believed the only true solution for Black people was
separatism. “Not only does America have a very serious problem,
but our people have a very serious problem. America’s problem is
us,” he said in 1963. “We’re her problem. The only reason she has a
problem is she doesn’t want us here. And every time you look at
yourself, be you Black, Brown, red or yellow — a so-called Negro —
you represent a person who poses such a serious problem for
America because you’re not wanted.”
There is a long history of African Americans leaving America —
voluntarily. Black writers, artists, scholars and revolutionaries
sought refuge in other places that would allow them to explore
who they were and what their identities were beyond the color line
drawn by America. Writer James Baldwin, who departed in 1948,
lived in Turkey and in France. “I left America because I doubted
my ability to survive the fury of the color problem,” Baldwin wrote
in a 1959 essay, “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an
American.” He explored the feeling of life as an emigre in a 1961
essay, “The New Lost Generation”: “I think my exile saved my life,
for it inexorably confirmed something which Americans appear to
have great difficulty accepting. Which is, simply, this: a man is not
a man until he is able and willing to accept his own vision of the
world, no matter how radically this vision departs from that of
others. ... No artist can survive without this acceptance.”
Though she later returned to the United States, Maya Angelou
spent years in Egypt and Ghana, beginning in 1961. “If the heart of
Africa remained elusive, my search for it had brought me closer to
understanding myself and other human beings,” Angelou wrote in
her book “All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes,” which covers
the years she lived in Ghana. “The ache for home lives in all of us,
the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
In 1969, Black Power advocate Kwame Ture, formerly known
as Stokely Carmichael, moved to Guinea with his new wife,
Miriam Makeba, the South African-born singer who would
become known as Mama Africa. After they married, Makeba’s
performances were blacklisted in the United States. “My concerts
were canceled left and right,” she said. “Speaking about South
African apartheid was fine, but they were suddenly afraid I might
speak about American apartheid, although I never did.” Nina
Simone famously left America in the 1970s, living in places
including Liberia, Switzerland, the Netherlands and France.
Simone told the BBC in a 1999 interview that she left America
after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: “I was
devastated. I wrote a song in his honor the next day called ‘The
King of Love Is Dead.’ ... I must have cried for two weeks. And it
killed my inspiration for the civil rights movement ... in the United
States and I moved away.”
When I traveled to Ghana, I paid my respects to W.E.B. Du
Bois, who had moved there in 1961 at the age of 93. Du Bois, a
founder of the NAACP and an organizer of the first Pan-African
Congress, is credited with inventing the field of modern sociology.
In “The Souls of Black Folk,” he pondered the predicament of a
Black American: “One feels his two-ness, — an American, a
Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two
warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone
keeps it from being torn asunder.” I carried the book with me from
high school to college and into the newsroom, trying to decipher
its meaning for me.
In Ghana, I visited his home and stood in the study in the
bungalow where he furiously wrote during the last days of his life.
In a poem called “Ghana Calls,” which he dedicated to President
Kwame Nkrumah, who invited him to move to the country, he
wrote: “Here at last, I looked back on my Dream; / I heard the
Voice that loosed / The Long-looked dungeons of my soul / I
sensed that Africa had come / Not up from Hell, but from the sum
of Heaven’s glory.”
To those who are unfamiliar with the history of racist terror in
this country, I know that the argument for departure made by
Black intellectuals may sound the same as the insults long hurled
by white supremacists, telling Black people to “go back to where
they came from.” But the root of those instructions are disparate,
incongruent. The white supremacists’ demand that we leave is
rooted in hate and racism. The Black intellectual’s case to leave is
rooted in the need to protect our existence, to find peace and true
freedom, to preserve ourselves, our sanity and our lives.
he more I watched, the more I reported, the more I
T researched history, the more intense my thoughts were about
leaving. And yet, I also kept recalling an interview I conducted for
my college newspaper when I covered the student protests against
the apartheid regime in South Africa. I asked a graduate student
from South Africa why he did not just move to another country —
rather than try to fight the entrenched racist regime of the
Europeans who had settled along the southern tip of Africa in the
17th century. “When a snake is in your house,” he told me, “you
don’t leave the house. You kill the snake.” It was a perfect quote to
explain the fight against apartheid.
I turned it over in the recesses of my mind for three decades.
Finally, I decided the difference between the graduate student and
me is that his people were indigenous to South Africa. It was the
minority government that had come and claimed the land. In
America, the fight was different. Black people were not indig-
enous to this land. They were kidnapped, trafficked and brought
here in chains. I realized that I’d rather leave than try to “kill the
snake.”
Black people have been trying to kill the snake of systemic
THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 21
racism and injustice in America for 400 years. Maybe, instead of a
snake, the better metaphor is a wall: Fighting entrenched racism
is like punching a brick wall with bare hands. In the end, the wall
does not move an inch. It does not bend. It does not break. I am
only human, and my knuckles bleed. Unless the majority of the
population becomes true anti-racists — that is, unless they
become actively involved in fighting against racism — little will
change.
Some of my friends say they would never permanently move
out of America. That we should embrace every constitutional right
and all the great benefits of being an American because Black
people built the wealth in this country. Alice Thomas, a professor
at Howard University’s School of Law, argues that African
Americans should stay and fight for justice here. “For me, there is a
distinction between leaving to not return versus leaving to explore
other places and then return home,” says Thomas. “I am one who
has no desire to leave the country, but I have a great desire to travel
the world. And I have traveled to African-centered destinations on
the continent and to the Caribbean. And to anywhere Black people
are in the world — to Amsterdam, Canada, Australia, Egypt,
Uganda and several times to Kenya, to Egypt.”
Thomas says she is a “global African citizen” who has traveled
throughout the world by choice. “The only choice I didn’t have was
coming to America. I know my ancestral homeland is not here,”
she says. “I believe I was one of the people put in the bottom of a
ship and brought over here, where we were raped, pillaged and
plundered. I am not an immigrant. I am a descendant of captives.”
And that brutal history is precisely why Thomas, who as a
professor teaches students how to use the legal system and the
Constitution to fight for justice, says she will not move perma-
nently out of the United States. “I am not giving up access to this
place,” she told me. “We paid a heavy price for it. Scholars call it
‘blood sweat.’ ”
When her son wanted to leave America and give up his
passport, she recalls telling him: “You will not give up the passport
because it is the key to the candy shop” — meaning access to all the
economic opportunities America provides. “It would be reward-
ing people who did what they did to my ancestors to give the key to
the candy shop,” she told me. “I will stay here and throw the
Constitution up in their face. I am going to be here. They would be
so happy if we all got on a boat and left. And I do not want to make
them happy.”
Thomas says she also won’t emigrate because too many people
who can’t leave the country would still be here suffering. “I want to
go as much as everybody else,” she told me, “but I have to stay. My
work, not only is it not near the end, I’m needed more now than
ever as a lawyer and legal scholar. The same reasons other people
want to leave are the same reasons I have to say. If I leave, it would
be worse for those left behind.”
I believe she and others are strong and heroic; I understand her
argument, and I respect the decision. But personally, I want
freedom and joy. For once in my life, I want to know what it feels
like to not be judged as a Black person walking through
predominantly White institutions, constantly feeling like I have to
jump higher, run faster, be better.
I have always been adventurous, having traveled as a foreign
correspondent to the sea ice of the Arctic, to Greenland where I
drank million-year-old water from a melting glacier, to Haiti
where I covered floods and regime change. I have traveled to many
places in Europe: to Paris, Copenhagen, Prague and London.
Each place, I have looked for Black people. But when I traveled to
22 OCTOBER 2, 2022
Africa and a crowd in Ghana shouted, “Welcome home,” some-
thing inside me moved. They say when you hear the truth, you
know it. To me that was truth.
After my trip to Ghana, I decided to start preparing for a life
outside this country with the aim of spending my retirement
abroad. At this moment, I can’t just get up and move. But I’ve been
getting things in order and saving my money. I watched YouTube
videos on downsizing and financial planning. I took boxes and
boxes of books and other items every weekend to Value Village. I
gave away anything that would hold me down. I cut expenses
where I could. I sold my house. I looked for new streams of
income, as many YouTubers have advised, to sustain a digital
nomad lifestyle outside the United States. I applied for a visa to
Ghana. I applied for residency in other countries where I could.
And when I feel solid, I will take the leap.
I know America is the land of opportunity. I respect it. I send it
gratitude for my life, my education and my career. I will never give
up my passport. The blue card allows me to travel the world. But I
want something more.
With a new sense of liberation, I told many of my friends about
my wish. I told my son. I told my sisters. I told my father. I told my
mother. “What do I think about you moving out? I’m happy for
you if that is what you want to do,” my mother told me. “If I had a
choice to move, I would too. I’m tired of all this bulls----. I’m tired
of all this racism. And it’s getting worse.”
My son, an engineer in his 20s, is a young man of few words.
Once, when he was a summer intern at an international engineer-
ing company in Washington state and meeting friends at an
Italian restaurant, a White man chased him through the streets of
a small town and shouted, “You do not belong here!” How could I
leave him? After years of conversation, he finally told me this
summer: He would move too. That was enough for me to smile
and start packing.
E ach day, it seems, comes another urgent reminder that I
should go. It happened again this summer, around June-
teenth. I was standing in the middle of the Ellipse, about 1,300 feet
south of the White House, interviewing a Black artist about a
garden installation she had designed to demand reparations for
enslaved Black people. Suddenly, a White man who seemed to
come out of nowhere ran through the installation screaming, “I
don’t care about your f---ing garden!”
Then he turned to us, the only two Black people standing in
that area. He screamed: “You n-----s!” He stomped a few more feet
and turned again, as though we had not heard him. Again he
screamed, this time louder: “You n-----s!” Then he walked away.
For a minute, it felt like being underwater or being a character
in a horror movie. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t. I wanted to hide,
but where? I wanted to speak, but the words were stuck in my
throat. I heard the words with clarity, but they were still confusing.
After what seemed like an eternity, I turned to the other Black
woman. “Are you okay?” I asked. Yes, she replied, then asked me
the same. “Yes,” I said. But I was shaken. Then the White people
who were working the table slowly came over and started
apologizing.
I always say racism is like being hit with an invisible two-by-
four. You can’t see the board. But the impact is just the same. It
hurts. That moment further cemented my plan: I would return to
Africa, to the Black rivers calling my name.
DeNeen L. Brown, a Washington Post writer, is an associate professor of
journalism at the University of Maryland.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF DENEEN L. BROWN