I'm a Black American. I Had to Get Out.
'The racism was too much. I fled.
LAMBEAU, Trinidad and Tobago — I watched the video of George Floyd taking his last breaths under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer while scrolling through Facebook early one morning here. The sound of crashing waves and my children’s giggles created the soundtrack for the devastating images.
My mother came out onto our sunny front patio, a cup of coffee in one hand and phone in the other. She also had news to share.
“They turned the unit I worked on into a Covid unit,” she blurted out. Everyone at her old hospital, she said, was complaining there wasn’t enough personal protective equipment.
If she hadn’t moved from New Jersey to join me here, just months before the coronavirus pandemic took hold in the United States, she would have been working as a nurse on the front lines of a war with a disease that has disproportionately claimed the lives of people of color and health care workers like her.
Our decision to leave the United States has spared us from so much suffering and danger.
“Mom,” I said, “we are refugees.”
In 2013, when George Zimmerman was found not guilty of second degree murder in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin — a black child gunned down in his own neighborhood, branded a thug in a hoodie — I knew I had to leave America.
The racism that had become all too familiar to me as a black woman was too much to bear. I packed my things, made sure to secure a few online writing gigs and moved in with my sister in Maraval, on the island of Trinidad. She’d moved from the States a few months earlier, after struggling to find work or afford a place of her own there, and secured a job with a government ministry and a two-bedroom apartment. I settled easily.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/black-america-racism-refugee.html
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