Fortune - America's Black brain drain

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August 11, 2020

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! McDonald’s sues its former CEO, Stacey Abrams talks about her political future with Janelle Monáe, and Black American executives working abroad reflect on why they have no plans to come back. Have a lovely Tuesday.

– America’s Black brain drain. Today’s guest essay comes to us from Fortune senior editor Beth Kowitt:

Last June at Fortune ’s Most Powerful Women conference in London (remember when we used gather in person?) I met Najoh Tita-Reid, an American marketing executive working in Switzerland. As we chit-chatted, Tita-Reid recounted what a positive experience she was having as a Black woman working outside the confines of corporate America. I tucked the conversation away in the back of mind until this spring when I checked in with Tita-Reid in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd and the protests that followed. I wanted to understand how the fight for racial justice in the U.S. was impacting her thinking about living abroad, as well as the experiences of other Black American expats.

The result of that reporting is out this week. I interviewed more than a dozen Black Americans living overseas for the story, and one theme came through in every single conversation: Their international experience was the first time race was not the primary frame of reference through which they were viewed.

Living abroad, “you’re an American, you’re not African-American,” Shaundra Clay, who lived in Europe for eight years as a health care executive, told me. “You are not made to feel like you are carrying the burden of anything. You are carrying the power of something.” She said it was a level of privilege she had never experienced before in her life. In the U.S., Nancy Armand, an executive at HSBC Bank USA, was always conscious of her gender and race, she told me. In the U.K., she was always conscious of her nationality first. “I’d never been an American first and then Black. It’s a refreshing change.”

As Tita-Reid explained, working in Europe has been like wearing an oxygen mask, allowing her to breathe—to lead and perform at her best without feeling the crushing weight of America’s dysfunctional racial dynamics at every moment. But for her, like many others I spoke with, being outside the U.S. as the Black Lives Matter movement continues to take hold has elicited complicated feelings—both guilt at not being on the front lines, mixed with affirmation of why they did not want to return.

As much as the story is about working and living abroad as a Black American, for me, it was also eye opening in what it revealed about the environment they are leaving behind—the exhausting struggle of being a Black executive in corporate America today.

Read the full story here.

Beth Kowitt
beth.kowitt@fortune.com
@bethkowitt

Today’s Broadsheet was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.

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