When news like the recent Zimmerman verdict is handed down, it’s not uncommon that disheartened African-Americans consider packing up and leaving the United States altogether.
Frustration with racist practices within the United States led to the relocation of famous expats like James Baldwin and Josephine Baker decades ago.
In their day, France was a popular destination for Americans looking to live abroad. Today, it’s China.
Safer in China
“I may get looked at funny – or occasionally have someone talk about me when they think I can’t understand them – but I feel much safer here in China than I ever did in America, which is a shame,” says David K. Law. Born and raised in the southern United States, law has resided in Shanghai for the past two years.
“Over the course of the two years that I’ve been living in China I’ve made an effort to keep up with current events back home. As a young black male, the Trayvon Martin case struck a heavy chord with me. I grew to be 6’4 the summer before the start of my eighth grade year. From the age of 13 I had to learn how to deal with certain people looking at me suspiciously or treating me a certain way based solely on the color of my skin, and what they perceived to be a threatening black man. Like many young black men before me, I received ‘the talk’ about how I was to conduct myself when dealing with the police. My mother lives 15 minutes away from Sanford, so I know that I could have easily been in Trayvon’s shoes,” he said.
As of 2010, figures from China’s national statistics bureau estimated there were nearly 600,000 foreigners living on the Chinese mainland. More than 71,000 were from the United States, making Americans the second largest group of expatriates in China after South Koreans.
It is perhaps a testament to the significance of race in China that there are no official estimates of how many blacks, American or otherwise, live in the country.
A media bubble
Law says aside from peace of mind, another benefit of living in China, where the media is state controlled, is that he’s removed from the sensationalism of the cable news cycle in the United States.
“I get most of my news from the internet and English-language newspapers here in China,” he says. “I and my black friends here just have to watch from afar and shake our heads.”
“I’ve been removed both physically and mentally from the whole scenario. My only connection to the case has been the Facebook statuses that I’ve seen and the news that I have read on CNN, New York Times and BBC,” says Robert Burton, an English teacher from Richmond, Virginia who’s lived in Shanghai for nearly a year. “I did hear that George Zimmerman was acquitted, and that did surprise me…somewhat.”
Burton says the Chinese aren’t perfect in terms of race relations, harboring some of the same biases as American whites, but the country doesn’t have the same history of violent and virulent racism. “We should worry about leveraging economic, political power from the Chinese, who are developing Africa and spend tons of money doing it – not cry over the spilled milk of how much our government doesn’t like us,” he advises.
Options and opportunities elsewhere
Paul Underwood worked for nearly a year in Shenzhen, a major city in the south of Southern China’s Guangdong Province. He returned to his hometown of Scottsdale Arizona in late June with plans of returning to China in August. Like Burton, he sees a brighter, perhaps safer, future for black Americans in East.
“I felt very comfortable and welcomed there,” says Underwood. “Many Chinese people have never seen a black American, much less a black person before. They were naturally inquisitive, but in a respectful manner,” he says. “The common perception of China in the media is not like how the people really are. It was very peaceful, serene and safe, not war mongering and violent. Also, Chinese citizens are forbidden from owning firearms, which eliminates gun violence.”
Underwood says that living abroad the first time had an effect on his view of the events surrounding Trayvon Martin’s death.
“It led me to the conclusion that a situation like what happened to Trayvon Martin would not happen anywhere else in the world, only in America,” he says. “And we have to realize that we live in a globalized society and that we have more options and opportunities elsewhere.”
Law, however, is a bit more leery of a mass exodus from the United States to a still developing country halfway across the world. “People make empty threats to leave the country out of emotion,” he says.
“While I’m not trying to equate sore losers of an election to the entirely justifiable outrage over the murder of a child, people make threats every four years to leave America and never do. The truth is: living abroad has its challenges and, just like people, no country is perfect. Instead of fleeing we should redouble our efforts to make sure Trayvon and those before him did not die in vain.”
Follow Donovan X. Ramsey at @iDXR