Today, fantasies of leaving the U.S. range from the facetious (“5 Places Black People Can Move to When They’ve Had Enough of America”) to the practical: advice from black Americans already living abroad that offers reality checks on the costs, documentation, and sacrifices required to skip the country. Notably, June 2016’s Brexit, in which 52 percent of Britons voted for Britain to leave the European Union, inspired a certain kind of optimism about black expatriatism. If the U.K. could leave the European Union, surely it was black folks’ turn to negotiate a mass exodus to anywhere but here. People searching the term “Blaxit” spiked in the days after the 2016 election and again in the days before Trump’s inauguration. Many African Americans hoped that they, too, could one day see America as Baldwin did: “better from a distance ... from another place, from another country.”

When I emigrated from Portland, Oregon, to London in 2003, it started as an act of political resignation. George W. Bush was only in the first quarter of what would be two presidential terms, but I was already wary of his politics. He’d started the “War on Terror” in Afghanistan and Iraq, which would have the U.S. embroiled in costly militarization for decades (about $5.6 trillion to date). The Patriot Act, signed into law in 2001, began to chip away at Americans’ civil liberties by expanding the government’s ability to track internet users online through monitoring email and telecommunications. And in the early aughts, just as women’s-rights activists expanded their demands beyond “abortion for all” to encompass an intersectional reproductive-rights framework, legislators introduced and passed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. The ban, which prohibits intact dilation and extraction abortions in the second trimester of a woman’s pregnancy, was arguably religious conservatives’ entry point for curbing access to reproductive care.

Read: Living abroad while black is tough.

After 15 years of teaching university students about civil rights and feminist and LGBTQ social movements, I wouldn’t have shocked anyone by responding to the Bush era by saying, “That’s it. I’ve had enough. I’m moving abroad.” But that wasn’t my entire motivation. I leapt at an offer to teach in the American-studies department at King’s College London because I wanted to experience being just black—not a black American—abroad.

My first reckoning with nationhood came as an undergraduate studying abroad at the University of the West Indies in 1991. Our professor there warned us students that Jamaicans would see us as American first, black second. Similar to today’s black-pride surge in popular culture, the cultural landscape in the U.S. in the early 1990s included the black feminism of Queen Latifah and the militancy and bravado of Public Enemy. Wearing African prints and generalizing about solidarity with “all African nations” in classrooms, some black Americans were in denial about the political realities of our home country’s aggressive imperialism. Our Jamaican hosts were warm and welcoming, but they also made us grapple with hard truths about atrocities committed by our home country, such as the economic crippling of Jamaica by the American-led IMF, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank.