“We don’t see race the same way. Class is more the issue here.”
The driver echoed sentiments I’d heard repeated to me in the office, at dinner parties, at fashion shows, and in doctor’s offices when the subject would come up. “It’s not the same here, you’ll see.”
And to a certain degree they were right.
Throughout history, many a Black American has moved abroad with a dream of living a freer life in a more accepting environment, away from lynchings, segregation, and Jim Crow, followed decades later by racial profiling and redlining. During the two World Wars, Black American troops, including both my grandfathers, traveled abroad to fight for and protect rights and freedoms they didn’t have back home. Experiencing a level of racial tolerance in the streets of France they didn’t even know among their own troops, many of them decided to stay. Similarly, artists, performers, and writers found audiences abroad were more accepting of their humanity off the stage compared to the States, where singers, dancers, and musicians weren’t allowed to eat, sleep, or even use the toilet in the clubs and hotels where they performed. As Paul Robeson put it when describing his time in Russia, “I felt for the first time like a full human being. No color prejudice like in Mississippi, no color prejudice like in Washington.”
So decades’ worth of artists—Josephine Baker, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Quincy Jones, Angela Davis, the list goes on—all migrated to France, while Paul Robeson and Claudia Jones moved to London. (France alone is so rich in Black American history that the cultural moment has inspired its own wave of tourism.) They all seemed to have the same realization—that, as Baldwin said, America is “better from a distance . . . from another place, from another country.”
I had romanticized my move to London, yes. I fantasized about joining a pantheon of Black writers who cut their teeth abroad in other countries, people like Maya Angelou, Claude McKay, and Carlene Hatcher Polite. But my motivations for leaving America behind were different from theirs. I simply wanted to try and see new things, to experience life in a different part of the world. To grow. Expand.
Now in retrospect, with the world being in the throes of a peculiar kind of PTSD, one in which identity runs a through line connecting the cultural and political shifts that caused it, I look back on the why of my move, and the overall absence of race in the equation, with a kind of nostalgia for simpler times. Whether those times were in fact simpler is another story. But in terms of my lived experience, they seemed so. My Blackness didn’t necessarily inform my desire or need to move elsewhere and expand my understanding of myself as it did with Polite, Baldwin, Hughes, Davis, and so many others. I simply had an opportunity, and I seized it without much introspection. And I now recognize that choice as a privilege, a luxury that I was able to enjoy because of the work they put in, creating space in countries, cities, and institutions over many decades for the multitudes of Black expats who came after, including me.
It was my life in the UK that drove home my awareness of the spider’s web of intersections that define my living. My life up until that point certainly wasn’t devoid of racism or sexism. But it took my moving away from the specific ways in which racism and sexism surfaced in America (because before London, I didn’t know any different) and discovering more insidious but no less pernicious kinds of bigotry for me to fully consider the impact discrimination had on me and how life might look without it.
All of this, while digesting the irony of moving abroad to lean in to my growth as an individual, only to repeatedly find myself in situations where I was reduced to being a spokesperson for one perceived demographic or another. Not to mention the obvious paradox of being an American traveling to England, of all places, to search for something more. England. With its monarchy, empire, and history of subjugating entire generations of people.
“What are you doing here in London? America is the place to be,” one taxi driver told me in 2011 during a cautious, slow-moving ride home. My adopted city had erupted in riots the day before, as young boys and men—some of them Black and brown—set buildings aflame following the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan by police in Tottenham. News pundits argued about deteriorating morals and strained race relations. I watched a vox pop in which an older Black woman delivered an impassioned rant on camera, ending the diatribe by announcing that she was ashamed to be Black, while a White news anchor nodded his head solemnly, effectively reducing a complex chain of events to a reductive single narrative. Tottenham had a history of deaths in police custody. Yet the media story had become about gangs gone rogue. And in the midst of it all, a solitary woman taking it upon herself to represent an entire people, her message one of shame and self-hate.
Her words contradicted the mood of Black joy and resilience spreading globally as the Obamas prepared to enter a second term in the White House.
Didn’t she know? It’s a beautiful thing to be Black. As I listened to the cab driver roll out his theory of where London’s youth had gone wrong, I thought for a moment that he might be right. Maybe the world had evolved since Baldwin’s day and America was the place to be. Not better from a distance but on the ground, where killings such as Mark Duggan’s were just as tragically common but were counterbalanced by a very loud and organized collective spirit of resistance nearly a century old. As the taxi driver wound our way through Canada Water, we could see a car in front of us filled with four White guys who were squeezed on all sides by enormous Sony TV boxes, brand-new electronics presumably taken during a recent round of looting. At a stoplight, they approached two women and offered to sell them one.
“Where to again?” The driver had worked himself up into such a frenzy about the ills of London and why government cuts and gangster rap were to blame that he had forgotten my destination.
And for a brief moment, I didn’t have an answer: “I guess, anywhere but here.”
Yes, I had romanticized my move to London, but I was under no illusion that the country was a postracial antidote to the ills of America. As far as I could see, the two were different sides of the same coin. And rather than waiting for a time to arrive in which Blackness wouldn’t be viewed as a hindrance, I decided to assert it as the bonus I knew it could be, speaking louder and taking up more space as time went on.
Where to? Forward. Always forward.
Chapter 5
In My Feelings
Amiri Baraka once described the act of staying cool as “to be calm, even unimpressed, by what horror the world might daily propose.” But what happens when the cool exterior cracks and the foundation shakes?
I don’t remember much about Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day other than sitting and crying in the conference room at work and the feeling of a colleague’s hand on my shoulder. I can’t remember the content of any of the speeches or what the First Lady was wearing, though as a fashion editor I no doubt had to write about it. I don’t remember how many people turned up on the Mall in Washington, DC, that day, though the figures have been the source of much debate. The only thing I can recall is how the day made me feel, how the events reduced me to the ugliest of ugly cries.
I was never a fan of showing that kind of emotion on the job. In fact, when an intern once broke into quiet sobs during a particularly stressful day in the office, I suggested she hold the tears until she could reach the privacy of a bathroom stall. All this discomfort with emotion despite my having edited and even commissioned stories about the power in showing vulnerability. I didn’t walk the walk.