There is a moment, usually late at night when the headlines have finished their daily assault, when the thought arrives uninvited: anywhere but here. The fantasy is vivid—passport pages fluttering like wings, a new city where no one knows the weight your name carries, a skyline that has never heard a slur shaped like your silhouette. It feels like oxygen. Yet before the dream hardens into a ticket, consider a quieter truth that rarely trends on the timelines that beckon you outward: your body, in this place, is a vote that has not yet been fully counted. Every census still admits the shortfall; every corporate board, every faculty photo, every Congress rolled out in commemorative portraits testifies to how few of us have arrived. Depart now and the photograph does not change; it simply forgets you were ever expected in the frame.
History is frank about what happens when black presence thins. The redistricting algorithms do not pause to mourn; they swell the remaining precincts until a district that once answered to church mothers and barbershop debates is suddenly represented by someone who thinks “diversity” is a seasoning. Grants written to study sickle-cell or maternal mortality lose their justification when the subjects are presumed to have emigrated. Cultural budgets evaporate once the festivals no longer fill parks; curators quietly archive the sounds that once spilled from front porches because the audience is now an ocean away. Each exit is personal, a private calculation of safety or sanity, but the accumulation is a census tract, a voting bloc, a curriculum that shrinks until the next generation of children learns that our stories ended with the last person who stayed long enough to tell them.Staying is not a romantic posture; it is labor. It is the daily choice to ride the subway car where no one else looks like you, to speak up in the meeting that mistakes your confidence for charity, to remain in the school district that still suspends black kindergarteners at triple the rate of their classmates. The fatigue is real, measured in cortisol and prematurely high blood pressure, but so is the leverage. Companies scrambling for “diverse talent” cannot hire ghosts; universities cannot photograph inclusion with empty chairs. Every additional year you remain is another dataset that refuses the lie of scarcity, another promotion photo that normalizes your face in power’s waiting room. The psychic tax is steep, yet the invoice is also a receipt: proof that the presence you resent having to justify is precisely what unsettles the equation that expected your absence.There will come a time, perhaps, when the balance tips outward—when the passport feels less like escape and more like expansion, when the language you have forced into every institution finally answers back in the currency of respect. Until then, let the departure be strategic, not reactive. Build the career that foreign recruiters cannot ignore, learn the languages that will open doors on whichever continent you ultimately choose, stack the credentials that travel light across borders. But do it from inside the system that still needs your imprint, so that when you finally leave you carry with you not only luggage but leverage: capital, influence, a network that will listen when you phone home saying, “Here is investment, here is a fellowship, here is a story that refuses to let them forget us.” Exile is only liberation if it is chosen; when it is coerced by despair it becomes another kind of removal, gentrification of the soul.
So stay another year, another five, long enough to make them recalibrate the quota they pretend is merit. Let your cubicle become evidence, your classroom a precedent, your mortgage a boundary marker they cannot erase with a bulldozer of amnesia. Train your replacement if you must, but make sure that replacement looks like you, speaks the vernacular of your grandmother, knows the difference between appropriation and homage. Then, when the plane lifts, you will not be fleeing a void but departing from territory you helped to claim. The stamp in your passport will read like a title deed, and the children who come after—wherever they are born—will inherit not only your escape but your occupancy, a map dotted with places you refused to surrender and places you later chose to explore. That is the trajectory of a free people: not running from absence, but expanding from presence, one unglamorous, indispensable day at a time.
