On June 19, 1865—the day we now commemorate as “Juneteenth”—the enslaved people of Galveston, Texas, learned they were free. The Emancipation Proclamation had been signed more than two years earlier. The news had simply not arrived until then.
I think about that gap often. The distance between the announcement of freedom and the experience of it. The way something can be technically true and still take years, generations, to land in the body—if ever.
And I think about what freedom, maliciously delayed, would have even meant to the newly self-possessed. Were they reaching for relief from the daily indignities, the particular violence of a system designed to extract everything and return nothing? Or did they believe it would mean something structural—the dismantling of the system itself? Slavery was technically over, but the system was not dismantled. Which means what was on offer in 1865 was not liberation. It was, at best, a temporary and conditional relief expected to be received as grace.
This pattern repeated itself in the generations that followed. The right to order one’s own steps, to live where you chose, to build in a neighborhood that would hold what you built—blocked at every turn. The freedom to move, which had always been a precondition for everything else, was managed, restricted, and re-administered through new instruments every time the old ones were formally prohibited.
In his 1945 autobiography Black Boy, Richard Wright wrote of leaving Mississippi years earlier: “I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . . to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom.” Isabel Wilkerson built her landmark book, The Warmth of Other Suns, around that line, as she documented the 6 million Black Americans who left the South between 1915 and 1970 in search of dignity.
When I left the United States for Spain in 2017, this, too, was an exercise in freedom of movement. I called it a break. I was burned out in the particular way that Black women in the U.S. get burned out—from the sustained physiological cost of living in a country that registers your presence as a problem to be constantly surveilled and managed. A bone-deep fatigue that rest did not ease, that did not belong entirely to me. It had been passed down.
There’s a name for this condition: “weathering.” Coined by public health researcher Arline T. Geronimus, who has spent four decades documenting its effects in Black Americans, weathering describes the way chronic exposure to racial stress accelerates biological aging, wearing down the body itself. By midlife, more than half of Black women show signs of advanced biological aging that cannot be explained by socioeconomic status alone. The problem, Geronimus argues, is not how well we take care of ourselves. It is how well society takes care of us. There is no current evidence that weathering stops, let alone reverses, on departure. What I felt abroad was real. It just did not happen on the tarmac.
But weathering is not the whole story. Corey Keyes, a psychologist at Emory University, identified a striking paradox: Black Americans report higher rates of flourishing than white Americans by clinical measures, even while carrying greater exposure to discrimination, stress, and physical illness. When Keyes controlled for perceived discrimination, the Black advantage in flourishing increased across nearly every measure, meaning Black Americans would be even healthier were it not for discrimination.
What the data registers as resilience is simultaneously evidence of what is being endured. To read it as proof that Black people can take more, that what has been suffered is not that bad, is to misread the data in a way that has consequences. It converts structural injury into individual strength and lets the structure off the hook. There is no current clinical evidence that weathering reverses on departure.
Three years after I had landed in Spain, still trying to understand what I had moved toward, what I had moved away from, and whether those were the same question, I launched my podcast and archive, Flourish in the Foreign. This happened on May 11, 2020, two weeks before the world watched George Floyd die on a Minneapolis street. My project became an award-winning, internationally acclaimed life-history archive documenting Black women living abroad, building narratives that mainstream media preferred to flatten.
Merriam-Webster defines flourishing as growing luxuriantly, achieving success, and being in a state of active production. That is the flourishing I named this archive after. Not a diagnostic threshold, but a felt life; the gap between those two definitions is where this essay lives. What the guests on my podcast describe—the body stopping its bracing, the jaw unclenching—gestures toward something the research has not yet followed them far enough to name. Flourish in the Foreign exists because I understood, from my own body, that the research could document the toll but could not capture the texture of what women were actually navigating—the calculations, the grief, the unexpected discoveries, the slow interior work that no wellness program had prepared them for.
Over six years, I have conducted more than 150 life-history interviews with Black women living across 30 countries. Through my recent “Aging Abroad” podcast series, I have begun revisiting many of these women years later, creating a rare longitudinal record that documents not only why Black women leave but how their understanding of wellness, belonging, and freedom evolves over time. The question Richard Wright asked—can the transplanted person grow differently, can they bloom?—is the same question running beneath every interview in my archive.
What this project has taught me, consistently and without exception, is this: Relief is real. And relief is not the same thing as freedom. Confusing the two has costs.
What does liberation require?
Niana was my first podcast guest. I had known her since we were both language assistants in northern Spain. She’s from Chicago, a city that received hundreds of thousands of Black Americans during the Great Migration, and whose children will likely never know the city the way she does because they are being raised in the Netherlands.
That, too, is what movement does across generations, disrupts identities and connections to place. I recorded our conversation in February 2020, 18 months after she had left Spain to follow her Dutch husband to the Netherlands, and months before the podcast publicly existed. She was still Spain-shaped, still grieving it from the flatness of the Netherlands.
Six years later, when she returned for the “Aging Abroad” episode at 42, she named what Spain had actually given her: “When I went to Spain, I felt free. I felt like someone had lifted something off my chest. But what came with that—it was just myself and my internal voice . . . it was super clear. It was super loud. It couldn’t be hidden by interactions with other people or distractions.” Spain is not devoid of anti-Blackness. But what it offered her was the specific removal of enough noise that the voice waiting underneath got loud enough to hear.
She also named what she had had to reckon with in that quiet—the guilt of the American differential, the specific social transaction of announcing her nationality and watching rooms shift in her favor in ways she knew were not available to the Black Spanish and Afro-European women around her.
“I felt a lot of guilt there because I knew that I had to say I was American,” she said. “I would immediately be treated differently and I would have access to things that this person who’s born here who deserves it will never have access to.” That observation, made 18 months out of Spain, was not yet theory. It was a pattern she had watched play out for five years and had not yet found clean language for. The essay you are reading is still looking for that language.
What began as a personal experiment became a sustained interrogation of what wellness actually means in the context of voluntary migration and whether what Black American women are calling freedom is what they are actually reaching for, let alone experiencing. The question moves through a historical thread: from Juneteenth, where freedom was declared but had not yet arrived in the body, to the Great Migration, where Black Americans moved North and West toward dignity and found a different version of the same constraint, to the present idea of Blaxit (Black Exit), a growing social and political movement of Black Americans away from the United States—and beyond.
The movement is global, but the question underneath is the same: What does liberation actually require, and is that what is being sought, or simply the next iteration of conditional relief? To name that distinction is the beginning of honest accounting.
Migration as liberation
Courtney grew up in a sundown town in Michigan. Her family integrated the neighborhood in 1988; her father, a police officer in a neighboring city, was stopped and harassed by local police every night driving home through the neighborhood where he owned property, because they did not believe a Black man belonged there, regardless of the badge he carried. Her mother had moved north from Mississippi following siblings who had already gone in earlier surges of the Great Migration.
“I consider myself a product of it,” Courtney told me on the podcast. She carried that lineage before she ever boarded a plane.
She built a life in Atlanta. In the first six months after she and her husband moved into a townhome there—one of the only Black families in the neighborhood—they had police called on them twice: once because a moving truck briefly blocked a cul-de-sac, once because a neighbor heard music and called rather than knock. The year before she left the United States, her closest friend died by suicide. Same age. In her wedding. Had just earned her Ph.D.
“Looking at my friend in a casket, somebody that just like looks like me and like is in the same life stage as me, really did something. It broke me open, quite honestly.” She flew to Mexico on May 1, 2021. She cried before the plane doors opened, tears streaming into her mask before they had even disembarked. Mexico is not devoid of anti-Blackness. What it offered her was the specific removal of the specific instruments that had been administering harm to her entire life.
“Migration as liberation,” she told me, “is a newer, modern way for us to reclaim our freedom.” She named the lineage she was placing herself inside: Josephine Baker in France, James Baldwin in Paris, Assata Shakur in Cuba—people who left not always because the world was offering them better, but because survival required departure. She named her mother’s Mississippi-to-Michigan journey as the movement she descended from. The wager she was making in Mexico was the same wager, updated for a different century and a global map.
I believe this. I also believe that liberation requires something that relief does not.
Relief is a change in conditions—the body stopping its bracing, the jaw unclenching, something long-held beginning to release. It is real and substantive.
Liberation is a change in structure—internal, relational, and political. It requires self-awareness about the construct you are leaving. A commitment not to rebuild it somewhere else. The willingness to be in genuine relationship with the place and people you have arrived among. To bring your gifts rather than your hunger.
Becoming, and the long work
Sienna came to Spain for the first time as a study abroad student from Vassar for five months, extended by a month on her own money, long enough that she wrote her senior thesis on the misrepresentation of Afro-Latina and Caribbean women there.
She went back to Brooklyn after graduation, worked a good job, and was unhappy in a way she couldn’t fully name. The freedom she had found in Spain had no equivalent in her daily life. She applied to the government language assistant program, got placed in Murcia, and moved permanently. That was 12 years ago. She had been building toward Spain deliberately, which makes what happened next the more instructive.
She still had her hair fall out at 24. As she said on my podcast, “That was almost like a culmination of all of the years of not living in alignment that had kind of manifested itself through my body.”
She had come home from the beach one afternoon and begun taking out her braids. Clumps in the shower. A month of doctors offering no answers. The geography had changed, and she had chosen it with intention and intellectual preparation. The survival mode had not. What Spain offered was the specific removal of enough noise that the interior work became impossible to avoid.
“Where you are does not matter if you do not do the work to heal, to become who you truly want to be.”
Twelve years later: VP of Growth at a talent and recruiting platform, a successful brand, Las Morenas de España, built and left on her own terms. A village of 700 people in Valencia. A partner. Chickens. A garden. Not the relief of arrival. The consequence of work.
Khephra came to Spain in 2013, before this was a movement, before it had a name, before anyone was using the word Blaxit. A New Orleans woman who had grown up bold and uninhibited arrived in Madrid and had to learn, for the first time, to have some inhibitions. She came because she wanted to, a desire that required no political rationale.
“I just left because I wanted to. I’ve always wanted the chance to leave.” She went natural, organized, started the first protest after Michael Brown’s murder with seven friends and a permit for 1,200 people—4,000 came. She does not fully belong in Spain. When she goes home to New Orleans or Atlanta, she does not fully belong there either. She has made peace with a diasporic home rather than a national one, a self assembled from chosen belonging rather than inherited geography.
“I’ve grown so much and, yes, I’ve been through so much, but I’ve also learned, don’t die. That’s the best we can do. That is liberating.”
That sentence is not ironic. It is this essay’s argument at its most earned and unsentimental—not the liberation of the golden hour, not the liberation of the terrace in Lisbon, but the liberation of a woman in her mid-40s who has been at this for over a decade and has found the courage to be disliked, to occupy her own full complexity, to stop managing other people’s comfort. She suspects her picture lines the finest bird cages and litter boxes in Spain. She is fine with that, as long as they got her good side.
Freedom is something to live
Ayoka B., a writer and poet from Washington, DC, was a featured guest on the podcast in March of this year. She discussed leaving America for Costa Rica, and also was guest essayist on my Substack, Letters From Elsewhere, in May 2026. She wrote about the evolution of her motherhood abroad in the weeks before her son—raised in Costa Rica from 13, fluent in Spanish, thriving in ways she could not have engineered for him at home—flew back to DC against her wishes.
She described her departure from the U.S.: “I felt like I was fleeing for my life because I was.”
Her son rode his bike to school, an 11-minute ride he navigated alone, something he could never have done in DC. He earned As and Bs. He played basketball on weekends and hung out at the beach. He moved through a community that evaluated him on what he contributed rather than managed him for what he might threaten. “My son could move around alone and with his friends, unbothered,” she said.
And then someone suggested he return to the States after graduation. He agreed. He had grown up in the freedom she made and did not know what made it necessary. He did not grow up in the DC that she survived.
“Now, he wants to return to the United States, against my wishes, at the worst possible time.” She named what he would be returning to: ICE raids, ballooning unemployment, police violence. She named what he did not understand: that there is a difference between visiting DC and living there, that he doesn’t know how to move in it, that his disposition—open and trusting, easygoing, earned on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica—could make him a mark. “My son, who has always had his own room, will be sharing a house with four people and sleeping on the couch.”
He flew to DC on May 28. She is currently filing paperwork for Costa Rican citizenship, hoping more options will lure him back. “I am terrified. I’m not as emotional as before, but I’m not OK.”
Crossing the gap
That is this essay’s most difficult truth: Relief can be built, inhabited, handed to a child, and returned. The freedom Ayoka made is real. Her son’s choice to leave it is also real. He never had to experience what made it necessary. He does not know what she survived. He doesn’t yet know what she knows.
On Juneteenth, we celebrate the day the news arrived. But what Juneteenth also documents is that freedom can be declared and not yet lived. There is always a gap—sometimes measured in years, sometimes in the distance between a mother in Costa Rica filing citizenship paperwork and a son on a plane to DC—between the moment liberation is made possible and the moment it is actually inhabited.
I am nine years into crossing that gap. The women in this archive are years and decades into it.
Niana, at 42 in a Dutch village, craving Lake Shore Drive, told me: “I can also say what might heal me may not be where I’m from, but I’m proud of that.” She holds both truths without resolving them. She has been holding them for 13 years.
We are not running away. We are running toward something that was never available where we started. The thing we are running toward is not a specific country. It is an experience of self-determination. It is an opportunity to cultivate a life well-lived, on our own terms.
Richard Wright asked whether the transplanted person could grow differently. Whether they could respond to the warmth of other suns. Whether they could, perhaps, bloom.
The women in this archive are the answer. Not because they have arrived. But because they are still growing.