The writer and comedian Jennifer Neal used to have a deeply smart travel column for The Root called Blaxit, with one very simple premise: things are just too twisted for Black Americans, so they might, like she had, be feeling the urge to go live in some other, freer country. But where? What is it like being black in different parts of Asia, Europe, elsewhere? Jennifer’s column was a way to find out. I recorded with Jennifer in Berlin for a pre-COVID episode of this show that I hope we can play soon enough, but this week she connected me with someone she had written about in her Blaxit column: Reggie Robinson, a African-American native of Dallas who is a middle-school history and English teacher and a longtime resident of Korea and now Taiwan. I had originally wanted to do an episode about Americans abroad generally, but that will wait. For now, as the police are rioting through my city and our nation, and as our miserable president says all the quiet, dirty parts of America’s social contract out loud, I’m glad to be able to spend the entirety of this episode with Reggie and his unusual vantage point from the other side of the world.

Show notes:

Blaxit: Seoul Edition by Jennifer Neal

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