#black-expatriates

#black-expatriates

They want to self-deport: they packed their bags, bought their tickets, and showed up at the airport to leave. And yet, they couldn't board the plane.

Karen Batchelor's discovery of her eligibility for the Daughters of the American Revolution was surprising, given the organization's long history of racism and elitism.

The United Nations resolution categorically states that slavery is the gravest crime against humanity, emphasizing the need for global acknowledgment and action.

After significant deliberation, taking into account both the affected public's concerns regarding the cost of the fee and the not insignificant anecdotal evidence regarding tax-related difficulties many US nationals residing abroad encounter, including in part because of FATCA, the Department made a policy decision... to propose alleviating the cost burden for those individuals who decide to request CLN services by returning to the below-cost fee of $450.

She said she stood in her new kitchen, which had radiant floor heating and a view of the fjord, and cried because the bread smelled wrong. She'd moved from São Paulo for a man she'd met at a data science conference. The apartment was beautiful. The healthcare was extraordinary. The man was kind. And the bread smelled wrong, and that wrongness cracked open something in her she hadn't known was load-bearing.

With time, as his research led to police intervention, he caught the attention of the city's gangs. In November 2024, during a period of escalating violence in the Haitian capital, gang members entered the compound where Gensley lived. They burned the radio station, my home and many other things in the area. They even killed his dog.

Laime Arold, a 26-year-old Haitian, buys energy bars at a small shop on the side of the Pan-American Highway in southern Chiapas, Mexico. Jose Adan, a Honduran, prays aloud in a park in Tapachula, asking God to protect him from kidnappers and the police along the way. Gerardo Aguilar, a Venezuelan, travels at 60 miles per hour, lying across two seats on a bus headed for Guatemala. The three all have something in common: they are in Mexico and they are migrants. None of them are heading north. They are heading south.

Unlike virtually all other non-European ethnicities, SWANA - or Middle Eastern/North African (MENA), as used in the show - is grouped under "White" on the US census. It's not just the census, though. It's medical forms, college applications, just about anything with a check box for ethnicity. Efforts have been made to change this, with some success. More institutions are adding a separate category on forms - and one might appear on the 2030 census.

From Senegal to Somalia and Egypt to South Africa, credit alert notifications from fintech apps such as Western Union or WorldRemit often set the mood for the rest of the day, week or even month. Transfers from workers within the continent and the diaspora to their relatives are often referred to as the black tax, whereby one person's salary and relative success can become the safety net for a whole extended family.

As U.S. job growth in 2025 reached its lowest point since the pandemic in 2020, Blacks have been hit extra hard. Their discharges stem from rollbacks in the federal government, DEI pullbacks, and large layoffs in areas such as education, health services and social assistance. Now, nearly two-thirds of Blacks in the U.S. are looking for a new job in 2026. Yet, 75% feel unprepared for the job search ahead.

As young people bear the brunt of a downturn in the jobs market, figures show a significant number are leaving the UK. Although statisticians caution against comparing annual figures after a recent change in methodology and stress younger people are traditionally more drawn to emigration, a net 111,000 people aged 16 to 34 emigrated from the UK in the year to March 2025, according to the Office for National Statistics.

A 2024 New York Times report notes that Mexico is home to over 1.6 million U.S. citizens - the largest American community abroad. But it's more than Americans: Argentinian, Spaniard, Chinese and Russian populations have all grown significantly, with Mexican authorities reporting a 64% year-on-year increase in Russian migrants in 2024 . The stereotypical CDMX immigrant - a digital nomad typing furiously from a café while nursing the same almond-milk cappuccino for hours (yes, I'm describing myself) - isn't the full story.

Walking through Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imaginationat the Museum of Modern Art, I noticed that the exhibition didn't have definite sections or texts, and the wall labels abstained from naming the nationalities of the photographers. It was an invigorating experience to be in a show that eschews geographic boundaries set up by Western nations, as well as rejects a cause-and-effect narrative that centers Western colonialism as a framework for understanding African aesthetic production.

The librarian sat me in front of a microfilm reader and brought out roll after roll of film. I stayed there for hours, squinting to decipher the archaic handwriting in the Free Negro Book, which was published annually in South Carolina before the Civil War. The names in each year's edition were alphabetized, but only roughly-all of the surnames starting with A came before all of the surnames starting with B, but Agee might come before Anderson, or it might come after.

Kim (not her real name) and I bonded when our sons played on the same travel basketball team. For years, we spent weekend after weekend together in loud, testosterone-filled gyms, rife with the smell of boy sweat and breakfast sandwiches. We always sat in the same place on the unforgiving bleachers, midway up in the center, and picked up our conversation from where we left off at the previous practice or game.

But rather than walk away from his creative calling, Driven said he pivoted - teaching himself videography and landing his first paid job through a Craigslist post filming Caribbean DJ, and DJ Mad Out. "That opportunity introduced him to New York's Caribbean music scene, where he went on to work with artists such as Shaggy, Ding Dong and Kranium," she said. "Those early experiences sharpened Hillmedo's eye for authenticity, capturing Caribbean culture not as spectacle, but as lived reality," she added.

Citizens of Nowhere is a documentary short about stateless people in the United States individuals who, through circumstance or legal technicality, belong to no nation. Without passports, citizenship or legal recognition, they live in a state of uncertainty. From finding work and accessing education, to simply existing within a system that does not officially recognise them, stateless people face endless bureaucratic barriers.

I think people don't always believe me when I say it, but living abroad has always felt more fun to me. I love the cultural challenges, the language barrier, the different food, and the process of figuring out the day-to-day. I'm originally from Conyers, a small town just outside Atlanta. In high school, I moved to Athens, Georgia. It was a typical small, suburban place - there weren't many people traveling internationally. Certainly, no one was moving abroad the way I eventually did.

Otherworldly forms greet you at the entrance to the exhibition, transporting you into a kaleidoscopic, dream-like space. A voice speaks in the background as projected images dance across the forms, animating the space. "It's been really beautiful to see her work come alive, become a landscape ... where you can traverse and kind of get lost," curator Fabiola R. Delgado says of Lisu Vega's "The Uncertain Future of Absence (El Futuro Incierto de la Ausencia)" (2025).

I once lived in a Black mecca. But by the summer of 2022, my toddler son and I were often the only Black folks on the playground in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a fact that felt both alienating and surreal. We moved to Bed-Stuy that summer to be close to my sister and her family. Reeling from a recent separation and scrambling for child care in a different neighborhood, I often found myself on the playground, trying to make sense of both our new life and this

To be Black in the U.S. has such an expansive meaning that traces back to Europeans deciding who got to be "white." While some people, like the Italians and Irish, earned their way into "white-ness," those with even a drop of Black in their heritage were relegated to the lower rungs of the racial ladder.