Black Lives Matter in America, but I can't blame Black folk for leaving a country that never wanted us as anything more than slaves while we wait for the end of the Civil Rights era. Our Sunday Long Read icomes from the LA Times, where the Blaxit is happening, Black folks leaving a country that has wanted us gone all our lives. Some of us are gone for good, moving to other countries where we're Black folk are treated like -- wait for it -- actual human beings.
Filmmaker Jameelah Nuriddin was locked down in Los Angeles during the pandemic, watching as the nation convulsed in protest over the murder of George Floyd, when she had an epiphany: “America does not deserve me.”
As a Black woman, Nuriddin always tried to work twice as hard as those around her, thinking: “If I’m smart enough, pretty enough, successful enough ... then finally people will treat me as a human being.”
But as she grieved yet another unarmed Black man killed by police, she decided she was done trying to prove herself to a society that she felt would never really love her back.
So Nuriddin, 39, packed her bags and left.
She ended up in Costa Rica, in an idyllic beach town on the Caribbean coast that has become a hub for hundreds of Black expatriates fed up with life in the United States.
She now spends her days working for U.S. clients from chic cafes, leading healing ceremonies at a local waterfall and trying to figure out who she is, exactly, outside of an American context.
“It’s like leaving an abusive relationship,” she said of exiting the United States.
The expats forging new lives in Puerto Viejo are part of a wider exodus of Black Americans from the U.S. in recent years, with many leaving for reasons that are explicitly political.
Exhausted by anti-Black discrimination and violence back home, they are building communities in countries such as Portugal, Ghana, Colombia and Mexico.
Often referred to as “Blaxit,” which combines the words “Black” and “exit,” the movement has been boosted by social media, where influencers share inspirational posts about their odysseys abroad and challenge others to join them.
It is also aided by a new industry of businesses that provide relocation services specifically for African Americans, and by Facebook and WhatsApp groups such as “Black in Bali,” “Black in Tulum” and “Brothas & Sistas in Mexico City,” whose members share tips on everything from how to pay local bills to where to find good hairstylists.
There are no official statistics on how many have left the country. But academics say it may be one of the most significant emigrations of African Americans since the first half of last century, when many Black artists decamped to Europe.
The late writer James Baldwin, who was part of that earlier wave, said he moved to France in 1948 “with the theory that nothing worse would happen to me there than had already happened to me here.”
Seven decades later, the U.S. is still grappling with racism, with Black people twice as likely as white people to be killed by police and Black workers earning less on the dollar than their white counterparts. In Florida, a new law forces teachers to downplay the impact of slavery, and across the country, far-right activists are seeking bans on books touching on Black history.
Americans of all races have been leaving the U.S. thanks to the pandemic shift to remote work. But for Black Americans, many of whom were distraught over the political and racial divisions the pandemic years highlighted, the decision to move abroad is about more than just saving money or having an adventure.
“It gave people time to question,” said Chrishan Wright, who launched a podcast in 2020 that documented her move to Lisbon. She now works as a relocation consultant and is helping about a dozen families restart in Portugal. They are mostly Black professionals with children, she said, in search of “a better quality of life without the emotional and psychological strain.”
Why stay in an abusive relationship with a country that has been trying to kill us for 400 years? I don't have an answer for that. But for more and more of us, the search for that answer is taking us outside America, and frankly I don't find anything wrong with that. "Nobody loves America like Black folk" the saying goes, "But America never loved us back."
When you fall out of love, there's increasingly little reason to stay.
Black Lives Still Matter. Even ex-pats.
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