A New American Migration

Black women at midlife are seeking better worlds abroad

- By Lebawit Lily Girma

In 2015, Stephanie Perry left her job as a pharmacy technician on the night shift and spent 12 months traveling across Southeast Asia, Australia, and parts of Europe. “I felt like my life revolved around my work, but traveling around the world showed me that there is another way,” says Perry, who is Black and in her 40s. “You can have a full life in other countries that we don’t necessarily have in the US.”

She wasn’t alone. The past three years of Covid-19 and increased social upheaval in America have caused a small but significant exodus of Black professional women from the US in search of a better quality of life. They are packing up, some with kids in tow, starting businesses abroad, and not looking back.

Michelle Wedderburn, now in her 50s, says she left Florida for San Miguel de Allende in 2018 with her now 10-year-old son primarily because she wanted to raise him to be bilingual, but also because she was concerned about school shootings in the US and the easy access to illegal drugs in South Florida. “I wanted his childhood to resemble a time when things were simpler,” she says. “Mexico provides us with this.”

Ashley Cleveland, a high-income tech professional working 60-hour weeks in Atlanta, got her third pink slip in five years in January 2020. After therapy for burnout and severe depression, the then-36-year-old realized she needed to change her environment. “I was living in a society that did not value the mental or physical wellness of Black women,” she says. Cleveland moved to Tanzania with her daughters, age 2 and 11, before settling in South Africa a month ago.