Our Exit From a Country Designed to Kill Black People

This article is excerpted and adapted from the book “We Quit America: Our Exit From a Country Designed to Kill Black People.”

Quitting America was not one decision; it was many decisions over time. It was small moments of awareness, like a flashlight pointing to the exit in a smoke-filled burning house: I couldn’t see my own hands as they reached out to help me find the way, but I moved toward the exit anyway. I felt the heat closing in behind me. I couldn’t breathe. My nostrils burned. And slowly, my eyes, although stinging, adjusted to the painful truth: America is bad for Black people. And there is no making it better. I had to get out.

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With the rise of white nationalism in the United States, I began daydreaming about returning to Jamaica, the land of my birth, and to a time when I was not Black. The tiny island would be a welcome reprieve from the unceasing racist ideology spewing from the political right since the election of President Barack Obama. My husband affirmed that a move to Jamaica was wholly possible and believed our nearly decade-long marriage, which was becoming strained, might have a better chance of surviving outside of the U.S. context.

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The famous debate between W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington is instructive. Du Bois was of the mind that a liberally educated Black elite should guide the way to progress and that education, political power, and integrationist strategies would be our way into society. Washington argued that African Americans needed a more industrial-based education that shaped practical skills and trades. He believed that would allow Black people to work our way up from the bottom of America’s socioeconomic hierarchy.

Even now, Black public intellectuals and organizers present cogent arguments for our path forward. Some cry “Defund the police!” and others say, “We need pleasure in our movements.” The point here is that Black people try shit! We have prayed for relief, and we have strategized. We have been conductors on the Underground Railroad, and we have conducted ourselves according to white society’s expectations. We have protested, and we have led uprisings. We have burned down plantations and police stations, both of which have been hubs of state-sponsored violence with “officers” intent on controlling Black bodies. We have accommodated. Boy, have we accommodated! Working in and for white people’s companies. Working hard to stay between the lines to hold onto that salary needed to pay the bills.

We have gone to the most elite schools, and yet our quality-of-life outcomes are different from those of other racial groups. For example, within 40 years or so of matriculating, Black men who had graduated from Yale’s class of 1970 accounted for 10% of deaths among class members even though they only made up 3% of the class (Howell, 2011). What this demonstrates is that elite education doesn’t protect us from the darts of structural and interpersonal racism. In fact, the striving it takes to “make it” — to contend with and negotiate our way in America — is killing us faster and more efficiently than other racial and ethnic groups, save perhaps Native Americans on some measures.

We have also built our own businesses and communities in a self-determined attempt to insulate ourselves from racism — and each time, white mobs, threatened by any semblance of Black progress, burned them to the ground. We have fought in wars and come home to discrimination. We have voted and turned out the vote. It has been said on occasion that we (Black women in particular) have saved democracy. And still — look at where we are.

This is also why we quit. We have worked hard on this American project, yet America at every turn digs in its heels and resists the kind of transformative change required for Black people to realize our freedom. Each time it seems as if change is coming, such as with the election of a Black president, America wags its index finger like the late basketball player Dikembe Mutombo and says, “No, no, no. Not today.”

Perhaps not ever.