‘We quit America’: a conversation with a couple that left the U.S.

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We recently published an excerpt from the book “We Quit America: Our Exit From a Country Designed to Kill Black People,” written by Yanique Redwood and Ronnie Galvin. As the U.S. prepares itself for a second Trump administration, folks are getting their passports ready and thinking about heading for the exits.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

AmNews: When did this idea of leaving the U.S. start, and what was the impetus for you as a couple?

Ronnie: So for me, it started with reading a book by Randall Robinson called “Quitting America.” And in his book he basically says that after all that he and Black folks have done to try to invite, encourage America to be who America professes herself to be, he reached the conclusion that America will never do right by black people. 

What Yanique and I say is we are discovering and holding on to the idea that America is irredeemable. And so that book for us, really helped us realize that “Oh, wait a minute, you can actually quit America.” So that’s what sparked our energy and imagination.

Yanique: I think it was around 2014 because we had just taken the kids to Jamaica for the first time. And Ronnie was the one who was saying at the time that this is something we could do. And I was initially quite resistant, because all I kept thinking about was my work. I have work to do at the time.

AmNews: A lot of folks that you talk to, and a lot of folks who come to your book talks have a hard time imagining uprooting their lives, right? How did you make the shift? Was it a moment? Was it a series of moments? Can you walk us through a little bit of what your personal journey was in making that decision? 

Yanique: I say in the book that it was a series of moments. Like, over my life, learning, as an immigrant to the United States, from Jamaica, that the United States hates Black people. Like just learning that my blackness was not a positive thing. The moment that it changed for me from resistance to acceptance was the day after we landed in Jamaica during the [COVID-19] pandemic. We had already gotten a house in Jamaica as a plan for retirement, so that felt fine to me. I thought “when I’m done working, we can make this kind of move.” 

The house was empty. So let’s go down to Jamaica. Let’s ride out this pandemic. We thought we would be there for maybe three months.  The next morning. I woke up and I said to Ronnie, “I can’t believe I’ve been saying no for so long to this possibility.”

And for me, that is the moment I quit. It was the day after we landed. It took a little longer for Ronnie, but for me, that was the moment.

AmNews: What crystallized for you that morning in July of 2020, that led you to say, “Oh no, no, I totally we should be doing this?”

Yanique: It’s hard to explain, because it’s more energetic. It’s like I felt different when I woke up and I just, I remember hearing birds in a way that I don’t remember hearing that much in the states. There was this real presence of nature, and I just felt like a different person. I don’t know, it’s hard to explain, and it feels energetic, it feels spiritual. I could go into my yard and pick something off a tree and eat it. That was another moment. It was “this is a very different way to live.” And those were some of the moments that crystallized for me, that I needed to be off of U.S. soil. 

Ronnie: We tell our audiences [to] think about it as a messy, complex divorce. And so early on, I was in the process of decoupling, moving from the intellectual part to the practical part. And that’s where I was struggling.

When we decided to leave we were at the height of our earning power as a couple. We got all the numbers in the book. And some folks are astounded at the numbers. But we made a decision to decenter work, which meant decenter income, and our income has dropped precipitously. That’s the word that we use, like by factors of magnitude. But what has happened is our kind of economic footprint also is smaller. 

And in the American context, it’s like, “No, no, you gotta make more money and you gotta spend more money.” But what we’re finding, and we interview 20 people from around the world who also are in various places of quitting, is that people are living much smaller, simpler lives that are much more fulfilling than when they were in the United States.

AmNews: It’s been about four years since you left. Looking back at the last four years, do you feel like you made the right choice? Do you feel happier?

Yanique: 100% I have no regrets. Yeah, we will not be going back to living in America.

Ronnie: Yeah, I have no regrets. I am grateful to the ancestors who we continue to learn from. Our ancestors have a history of doing that great migration, all the people that left the United States to go to Europe and all over the world. So no, I feel like we are a part of a movement of not just our ancestors, but current day folks who have — sadly, like my heart is really broken over this — come to the conclusion that America will never do right by Black people.America continues to be unrelenting in its attack and ingenious in the ways that it continues to attack and undermine Black life. Those things are baked into the very structure of the social contracts, politics, hierarchies, and ethos of the country. It represents who it was founded by, who it was created to privilege, and who it was designed to extract from and destroy.

And so we are grateful that we were able to get out consciously and geographically and going forward. Our hope is that we can continue to build community with folks inside the United States, Black folks across the diaspora, because we think we’re in a time where we gotta accelerate the effort to build pathways and infrastructure so that more people can quit consciously, and then, if they so choose, quit and leave the country.

Yanique: We’ve had folks stand up in book talks and say that we are being selfish for leaving them, for leaving folks behind. We said, “Yes, this was an act of self preservation.” 

So we always say we quit America, we do not quit Black people. That’s right, we do not quit Black people in the U.S. We do not quit Black people in other places around the world. We think that all of us, in the Caribbean and other places in the diaspora, we can all work together from wherever we are.

Ronnie: We want Black people to know that we love you and we are doing what our ancestors did before us. We’re making a way out of no way, and more than anything, when the American tyrannical empirical system tries to present to us that there are no other options or choices, we want our people to be deeply suspicious of that and to push beyond that.

And to know that there’s always more than what America is presenting at any particular moment, and that in this moment where the whole country is in an uproar for all kinds of reasons related to the election and who got elected, that this is a time for Black people in particular to not turn away from each other, because we’re being pitted against each other right now.

This is a time for us to turn to each other, and that our reality is not confined to the borders of the United States. Our reality is global, and so our hope is that with our book, our story, and the stories of others around the world, that we can present those choices and options to more people, Black people, who we love.