As I endeavor to revise my memoir, “Fall over Blackwords”, I want to share what I have learned along the way, covering a different topic every month. After talking about the topic, at the end of the month I will post a section of my book.
This month will be about escape, specifically leaving the United States for other countries. The pandemic, political unrest and ever present racial turmoil have contributed to regular conversations amongst family and peers about where else we could go if need be.
My husband, Vincent, and I stumbled upon a video by RT Documentary a few weeks ago detailing how hundreds of African-Americans fled racial discrimination in America and relocated to the USSR in the 1920s-1930s. The documentary, “Stories of Black Americans, Who Fled to the USSR to Escape Race Discrimination,” interviews the descendants of those refugees’ who still reside there today.
The Afro-Russians interviewed agree that while they too have encountered their fair share of racism, it was always casual and individualized, never the federally upheld systemic racism their ancestors ran away from.
The prologue of my book describes how my experience as an American descendant of slaves, or an ADOS, is directly tied to my decision to raise my children bilingually, as a means to afford them access to even more of the planet, in the event that they may need to escape the systemic racism built into the foundations of the US one day. Having command of two of the most spoken languages opens up a lot of geographical possibilities to build a life and make a living, if conditions ever required it.
Below, I have linked the documentary as well as a blog post discussing it in case you also want to learn more.
www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/black-skin-red-land-african-americans-and-soviet-experiment
Bilingual SuperNoVAs 