Black Expat Privilege during a pandemic

I have started and stopped this reflection a couple of times over the past eight weeks. The first reflection was thoughtful yet outdated in just a short amount of time. The second reflection was more serious and but wasn’t fully honest with how I really felt about my life in the time of Corona. Hopefully, the third time is the charm.

Here it goes….

I am very grateful to be a Black woman living abroad during this pandemic.

I wake up each morning with my physical body in one space and my mind thinking of home. When I moved abroad eight years ago it was to seek adventure, job opportunities, exposure to other cultures, and the ability to pay my bills on time on an educator's salary.

Now here I am in my adoptive home country knowing that I am safe and protected, but also praying for my birth home country to be ok. That the dysfunction, the abuse, and the inequity of life is still in a place that I want to return to one day.

I sit in this weird space of happiness, privilege, shame, and guilt.

In this time of crisis, never have I ever felt so stable, safe, and protected in my circumstances. An advantage gifted to me living in a country where my passport designation is the item that matters, far and above my home country’s label of me.

Black Americans living abroad were talking about COVID 19 since early January. The Nod network is tight. You begin to chat with friends who work in China, making decisions to stay in other countries instead of returning to the United States to ride things out. As the virus moved West, more of us either made the choice to stay in our adoptive homes or be able to afford the final few flights back to the states to be with loved ones because of the instability of another countries systems.

I made the decision to stay. Actually, my mom and dad made the decision for me. It was a no brainer really. I could choose to:

• Go to the grocery store and get my basic needs and some luxuries filled or fighting with people for the last package of toilet tissue.
• Being able to access testing quickly and cheaply (or no cost at all) or waiting to see if my home state has enough tests.
• Knowing the clear rules and precautions set by my adoptive government, or muddled messaging and misinformation from my home country’s leadership.
• Living safely and in good health or becoming another statistic of the disparity of Black people dying every day in America compared to whites, especially in this crisis.
• Living in a space where everyone desires to help flatten the curve or being in a country where protests breakout over misinformation and narcissism.

Why go back to a place where the odds are so stacked, that one foot back home increases your chance of dying from inadequate care because no one in the West took this disease seriously?

I think back to my life as a case manager for the Department of Child Services. I often managed the cases of teenagers who pretty much grew up in foster care. Their birth parents suffering from addiction, mental illness, institutional poverty, and generational curses. So they were forced or chose to release their children to the care of the state. It wasn’t perfect for some but for a good number, their odds of graduating from high school increased, their life expectancy increased, the ability to have choice increased.

But as soon as they turned 18 and were given the freedom of decision making on their own, the majority returned back to the same situation of abuse, addiction, and mental illness. Because no matter what, the guilt of knowing that your life can and will be better because of choice, eats at you in a weird way. So it’s easier to decide to return and hope to make things better because you are taught the belief that choice is something for the privileged few.

Choice is a privilege that is often gifted to those who have power and walk in the confidence of knowing that you have options. When you are given this power, with no strings, it is hard to navigate.

Every time I am able to sit in relative silence in my current apartment with working wifi and a cup of coffee, is the realization that 9 years ago I couldn’t work in my apartment because I couldn’t afford wifi. So I will go to a Starbucks and get refills of hot water for the tea bags I snuck in.

That every time I can chat with my current students and provide assistance online in my adoptive country, the realization that when I worked in a school in the states, I would have to door knock on homes to make sure my students had something to eat when school was closed.

The fact is that as a Black woman abroad, I have the privilege of having choices. I know it’s power and I know how grateful I am for it.

However, no matter how good I have it, there will always be a piece of me that wants to go home.

I cried my first real tears last week because I made the choice to stay where I am for the summer. It’s the smart thing to do: continue to pay down debt, the stability of systems in place in my adopted home, and the hope of being able to make this small sacrifice to be home for an upcoming wedding in early fall.

That’s the privileged price I pay of having a choice- staying away from my family during this time of crisis with the hope and prayer that I will see them soon. But if I was still living in the states, I wouldn’t even have the privilege to be that confident.

So here I am, holding on to the blessing to have the choice to sit in this weird space of happiness, privilege, shame, and guilt.