Through foggy lenses in the airport security line, I stared at my two small bags, vision blurred by the N95 mask. My one-way ticket to Puerto Vallarta felt heavy with my father’s plea to remain in the United States. His familiar sermon on a mental loop, “You know your ancestors fought for our right to vote…” but this time, I was leaving for good. The Black-in-America chip on his shoulder threatened to become my eternal cross to bear. Despite lacking concrete plans, I desperately needed an alternative path, one that transcended mind, body, and soul. The mass Blaxit of 2020 met me at the crossroads, and I was ready. 

I almost surrendered to the guilt card—one that felt like an UNO draw-four attack rightfully in my father’s arsenal. I passively collected his sentiments, adding them to my apathetic deck of possibilities, and reflected on the game being played. It was true: my grandparents, who migrated North to Oxford, Ohio, had endured more than I could ever fathom. Being Black in America, our sacrifices have always been wrapped in the delicacy of shame and the weight of secrecy. 

My father would tell me stories of his rugged boyhood days on the 80 acres of prosperous Georgia farmland, now buried under a government-funded golf course. This generational plot of land that never reached its full potential by their hands is another cultural trauma that makes me akin to those who bleed from the blade of oppression: To be a child of the African Diaspora whose seeds sprouted on American soil is to be in a constant state of disillusionment. 

The obliteration of African life has dispersed pieces throughout the world for the children of the Diaspora to reassemble. Great grandma’s “golf course” is a perversion of promised lands, a topographical representation of how colonial forces suppress, commodify, and gaslight people of the global majority to forget any semblance of an origin story. How endless are the tools of oppression. 

Ironically, I picked up my first golf club at three, training under Dick Bury, the 1970 Michigan PGA Tour champion. This was, of course, a deliberate choice by my parents, as they strove to raise a multidimensional Black girl who could navigate spaces she wasn’t expected to occupy (and yet would still be challenged to uphold), painfully white spaces she might eventually access if she strategically played those damned cards right. 

I always questioned whether this symbolic access was truly the liberation my ancestors imagined for me. Was it merely a “seat at Massa’s table,” or would it ever give me a say about what was being served? The lack of nuance we’re taught in the U.S. regarding race creates an oversimplified narrative, leaving our mental landscape too polluted to navigate the complex psychological terrain of the Black American experience. My skepticism deepened over time when, at age eleven, I was thrust from a predominantly Black ecosystem in Southfield, MI, into the predominantly white schools and neighborhoods of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. As I navigated these white spaces, the trauma of assimilation seeped into my tokenized identity. It became evident — no matter how you approached it, attaining the “American Dream” was like grasping at sand, eternally slipping through your fingers… 

Though the oppressively dominant U.S. culture tries to erase Black and Indigenous histories from our collective memory, the waters never forget. The Earth’s oceans, holding 97% of our planet’s water, serve as humanity’s most profound archive – storing not just sea life, but the memory of all who traversed its waters- willingly or otherwise. The unactualized aspirations of enslaved Africans, though scattered across the Atlantic, persist in its currents. Like water molecules that maintain their essence through state changes, the deferred dreams of those enslaved peoples may have taken on new forms, but their radically liberatory potential persists, calcified in the bones of their descendants. 

At Ghana’s Elmina Castle, the infamous “Door of No Return” stands as a stark monument to transformation—both physical and metaphysical. Through this portal, countless Africans were forced into a new existence, one that would alter both their lives and their very genetic code. Research shows this savagery left lasting impacts on Black Americans’ DNA, with Dr. Joy DeGruy’s work on Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS) showing how slavery’s survival behaviors persist in contemporary African American life—from feelings of inadequacy to hypervigilance. These patterns, reinforced by systemic racism, influence everything from parenting to responses to discrimination, and have left me unable to see myself clearly through colonialism’s prism. 

These psychological impacts must be considered when seeking solutions to long-standing issues. Colonial Stockholm Syndrome (CSS), similar to “Uncle Tom Syndrome” inspired by Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, represents how colonized peoples form psychological attachments to their oppressors through centuries of coercion and internalized values. CSS is about power, who wields the power to create the pain, and who can simultaneously make it go away.“Political movements that rely on psychological manipulation don’t relinquish power easily; they adapt and reconfigure their messaging to maintain control and foster dependency among their supporters.” Zubizarreta, D. (2024). Colonial Stockholm Syndrome: The Enduring Legacy of Psychological Manipulation and Cultural Control in Postcolonial Society. 

Black folks in America have been habituated into being respectable, docile even, seeking out Massa’s tools to dismantle the very plantations built to entrap us. As we stand at this critical juncture where the illusion of an “of, for, and by the people” American democracy itself is under speculation, I ask: Did our ancestors truly envision that their descendants’ greatest achievement would be political participation in their captors’ electoral system? Would they have dreamed that Black women, in particular, would become the stalwart defenders of a democracy that continued to deny their humanity even as recently as six decades ago?

In 2020, amid a global pandemic and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement with its widespread protests, the renewed considerations of repatriation blossomed. From beyond America’s borders, a year prior, Ghana’s president, Nana Akufo-Addo, launched a year-long initiative, encouraging African Diasporans to invest, visit, and settle on the continent. Following the first election of Donald Trump to the nation’s highest office, the discourse around Black Americans permanently divorcing the U.S. has only grown exponentially, which should be viewed as a radical movement rather than a flash in a pan moment. We’ve yet to find a vaccine for the bacterial morphology that is white supremacy. As long as it continues to take on insidious shapes of harder-to-spot but equally lethal forms of oppression, Black Americans will continue flirting between the tensions of staying in the U.S. to fight for justice and inclusion, or turning to the potential ecstasy of seeking refuge elsewhere. 

During this same time four years ago, I found myself residing primarily in remote off-grid surf towns in Morocco and the Pacific West coast of Mexico. I began the process of mental and spiritual decolonization from my former Western psyche, treading lightly on foreign lands and embodying the humility of a guest by making sacred offerings wherever I traveled. The echoes of my Blaxit linger in the shadows of America’s forbidden past, carried out by legendary figures from Maya Angelou to W.E.B. Du Bois. Once again, the call for Black Americans to get out of the U.S. is growing louder. 

I answered this call not because I thought it had all the solutions, but because it absolves Black women like me from the constraints of our attachments to who we’ve known ourselves to be in relation to the particularly deadly brand of racism the U.S. has made its patrimony. I answered the call, burnt out from tenant organizing during the outbreak of a viral entity that shut the world down, completely rearranging neural and concrete pathways to engage with the world we’d been inhabiting. I answered the call because the rings reverberated in my spirit, and echoed back—”this is a path of least resistance, this is the path to break free.” 

I do not claim the pursuit of life abroad as an end-all cure to racism, as anti-Blackness is a global phenomenon. However, removing my physical body from the ceaseless violence the U.S. has built into every facet of its society illuminated for me that there’s a war being waged on our collective consciousness. This outright psychosis has kept many Black Americans under a sort of perpetual amnesia for centuries. That is to say that the lingering effects of slavery are still being played out not only through policy, or lack thereof, but through codes embedded deep in the throes of our psyches. 

Since the onset of chattel slavery in the U.S., enslaved Africans were kidnapped, brought to the Americas against their will, and have been in a toxic relationship with the U.S. that has sustained unspeakable abuse against marginalized communities ever since. Throughout this process, Black Americans have mastered the art of alchemy—turning scraps into delicacies, twisting and innovating language into transcendent sacred songs, plaiting maps in the braids of our hair. That resilience has become our identity is a poetic tragedy stifling the next phase of our transformation, until we once again alchemize our pain into power, reclaiming our right to define ourselves beyond the constraints of our imposed indoctrination.

Unfortunately, turning towards our oppressor has been a comfortable strategy, eerily similar to how victims of kidnapping or abuse attempt to increase their chances of living. After hundreds of years of “racial gaslighting,” have we forgotten that a honeymoon phase often follows cycles of abuse? The abuser apologizes, does something nice, and promises never to harm the victim again. We’ve seen this play out time and again in the “relationship” between the U.S. and its Black citizens, with meaningless actions that are not grounded in valuable change. We would quickly expire if we were to hold our breath waiting for legislation to be signed that enacts actual police reform, or hoping for significant investments in our civil and reproductive rights. 

As Black people continue to grow weary from systemic abuse, the desire to Blaxit intensifies, threatening the very nation that relies on its most marginalized citizens to remain under that colonial spell to uphold its falsities. The emergence of alternative ways of living and thinking could indeed have a profound impact on the future of the United States. As we are in an infinite state of becoming, the process of coming undone alongside our Nation ushers us into a visionary paradigm of new solidarities. Black people are migratory people. Blaxit is an active invitation to empower ourselves by acknowledging the autonomy we have in the midst of the rapid unraveling. As we weave our stories into other cultures’ narratives, communities, and languages, we alter the enduring essence of our global footprint—who we were, who we are, and who we can become. 

Though I can’t trace my ethnic roots back to Mexico, as a descendant of the enslaved, it’s not lost on me how dispersed our seeds of liberation are. In Nacimiento, Coahuila, in 1852, thousands of enslaved people escaped from the U.S. via a clandestine Southern Underground Railroad route, and their descendants remain there today. Here I am now, a bona fide resident of this former refuge of a nation for my ancestors, though they may not have ever known to seek it. 

Of course, not everyone has the means to leave the U.S., nor is it devoid of challenges. When 52% of Black Americans report that their fates are strongly connected with other Black Americans, we’re talking about more than individual choices -it’s leaving behind a deeply woven tapestry of shared struggles and triumphs. Additionally, 76% of us consider our Blackness fundamental to our identity, which speaks volumes about the psychological tug-of-war we face. This isn’t just about changing zip codes; it’s about potentially uprooting ourselves from the very soil that has nourished our resilience and cultural identity, even as that same ground threatens to swallow us whole. Blaxit demands more than just physical relocation – it requires us to reimagine who we are beyond the confines of American anti-Blackness, while honoring the communities that have held us through generations of resistance. 

Truthfully, I am very aware that the nuances of my own complex identity give me access to certain privileges as a foreigner. The economic power of my earned income in U.S. dollars, and the implied social and global status of being a U.S. citizen, can often serve as an added layer of protection from global anti-Blackness and overall resource accessibility. Thus, I aim to practice reciprocity by supporting local businesses, learning the language, and engaging meaningfully with communities rather than merely extracting from them. I strive to be mindful of my impact, ensuring my presence contributes positively to the local economy while avoiding the

perpetuation of harmful tourist-centric dynamics that can drive up costs for residents. I also acknowledge that a middle-class upbringing, college education, and other related factors have helped me to confidently navigate spaces where I’m othered. 

A mass call to Blaxit can be an act of dismantling the colonial legacies that remain lodged in our psyches, if the exiting parties are committed to leaving the psychological baggage of colonialism behind as they embark on new lands. Nonetheless, the possibility of what we can heal and release from our ancestral lineage is worthy of our exploration. 

If we do get out, we must avoid recreating what we flee—race aside, the psychological markings of colonialism penetrate us all deeply. Ultimately, the racialized experience starts and ends in the physical body, and the body, like the waters, remembers. Giving our beautiful Black bodies the chance to detoxify from the harm the United States has caused them is the type of freedom I’d like to believe our ancestors are rooting for.