A year ago, I left America for good, or so I thought. I was burned out, disillusioned, and convinced that as a Black man in this country, the cost of staying had crossed from difficult into untenable. My wife and I moved to London with our Scottish terrier, chasing what I described at the time as "not just survival, but the possibility of flourishing." We secured positions in U.K. academic programs, sold off our Seattle life, and crossed the Atlantic believing we had found a way out.
I was wrong. Not about America’s failures (they remain real, entrenched, and accelerating) but about what it means to leave and what it means to fight. As an Army veteran, I should have known better.
I came back last week. Within days, I accepted a six-figure role in student conduct at a university. I didn’t return because London failed. I returned because distance clarified something my grandfather, a Korean War veteran, and my great-grandfather, a World War II soldier, understood without needing to theorize it: this ground is ours, too. Why should I leave it?
The Peculiar Negro Returns
My grandfather used to call me a "peculiar Negro." I read X-Men comics, loved anime, and spoke "too proper." What he saw as peculiarity, I now recognize as refusal: the refusal to contort myself into someone else’s narrow idea of Blackness. That refusal carried me from poverty in Richmond, Texas, through Army infantry, corrections work, and eventually a PhD. That same refusal took me to London, and it is the same refusal that brought me back.
Leaving wasn’t impulsive. It was calculated, data-driven, and fully justified by the numbers regarding racial wealth gaps and life-expectancy disparities.
The systematic dismantling of DEI infrastructures I had spent years helping build felt like a final straw. When the 2024 election results came in, it felt like confirmation rather than surprise. The trajectory was obvious: America wasn’t correcting course; it was accelerating toward something uglier. I didn’t want to be here when it arrived.
London offered a different rhythm. Racism exists there because Britain has its own unresolved colonial rot, but it felt less explosive. It felt less likely to end in a traffic stop turned funeral. The academic environment was serious, healthcare was universal, and the cultural exhaustion with American-style political hysteria was almost comforting.
But clarity comes with time. The lower salary wasn’t just an economic adjustment; it was a reminder that even "progressive" Europe trades in hierarchies, just with better branding. More importantly, I learned that distance doesn’t dissolve the psychological toll of being Black in a white-dominated Western society. The hypervisibility follows you. The code-switching follows you. The performance tax follows you. You don’t escape it by changing postal codes.
What the Pseudo-Tough Guys Don’t Understand
Since returning, I’ve been thinking a lot about American masculinity, specifically the cosplay version that has metastasized in the age of the "alpha-male" grift economy. These men love to talk about toughness, warriors, and domination. They consume violence as entertainment and confuse aesthetics with substance.
As a U.S. Army infantry veteran and a former corrections officer, someone who has been in situations where violence wasn't theoretical, I can say this plainly: these men don’t know what they’re talking about. Real violence isn’t cinematic. It is chaotic, irreversible, and expensive in ways they never calculate.
Real toughness isn’t watching cage fights or memorizing "warrior codes." It is showing up daily inside systems engineered to grind people down and choosing to build anyway. It is working with young people, especially young men abandoned by every institution that claims to care, and believing intervention still matters when the data says otherwise. It is understanding that America’s problems aren’t solvable through individual self-optimization or dominance fantasies and committing to collective struggle regardless.
The Work That Called Me Back
I returned to higher education because, despite everything, I still believe in students. My role in student conduct is often misunderstood as punitive, but I see it as interruptive.
Every student who lands in my office represents a failure upstream: a school system that discarded them, a family stretched beyond capacity, or a culture that equates worth with dominance. My job isn’t to punish; it is to disrupt trajectories before they harden.
If I can reach a young man before toxic masculinity calcifies into identity, that matters more than any expatriate salary. If I can model a version of Black manhood grounded in intellect, emotional fluency, community care, and structural critique, maybe he won’t grow into someone yelling about toughness online while voting against his own survival.
My Allegiance to This Soil
There is a particular kind of American conservative obsessed with questioning Black loyalty. "If you don’t like it, leave," they say, as if displacement were a rebuttal. They wave flags while supporting policies that would have kept my ancestors enslaved and me excluded. And look, having lived in London, Vancouver, British Columbia, I also can say that when people don't want to do that, I don't regret experiencing it at all.
What they miss, though, is history. My family’s roots here aren’t shallow; they are structural. My ancestors didn’t immigrate; they were stolen. And once here, they built this country. The labor, the wealth, the culture, and the innovation of America are unimaginable without Black people. This is our country, whether white supremacists accept it or not.
So staying isn’t naïveté. It is a refusal. It is a refusal to surrender ground my people paid for in blood and labor. It is a refusal to let the next generation believe the promise was never meant for them.
Choosing the Battlefield
The problems I fled in Seattle exist in London. They exist anywhere Western capitalism and racial hierarchy operate. The expressions vary, but the architecture remains. Personal escape is not collective liberation.
The real question isn’t whether to fight or flee; it is where to stand. For me, that is here in Seattle and in higher education, building the mentorship structures I needed and didn’t have.
I have no illusions. The next few years will be brutal. But power is never as solid as it pretends. Systems always crack, and our task is to widen them. I came back because this is where I am most useful. Not at a safe distance, but in the work. My ancestors fought abroad and endured at home. I honor them by staying.
Presence matters. Visibility matters. Occupying spaces you were never meant to enter is resistance. The boomerang came back not because the throw failed, but because that is what boomerangs do. I’m here to fight. Peculiar Negroes always are.
