What do you think?
Rate this book
Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man From His Native Land
Randall Robinson is quitting America, and this book charts his journey from the most powerful nation on earth to the tiny tropical island where his wife was born. His search for a more peaceful and hospitable place grew out of the disappointment and increasing sense of abandonment he felt in the land of his own birth—an America that has sapped the creative energies of his race and has “transfigured humanity.”
Here, in a culture that is as different from America as black is from white, Robinson shares why he needs to escape the racism he has fought all his life. Yet America is never far from his mind. The current state of political and socioeconomic affairs and why our leadership will continue to fall short of our expectations continue to inform his writing.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
April 22, 2008
This book is so good and traces the story of the authors reasons why he decided to leave America, and he makes a good case. The facts and stories presented in this book are so interesting. This book is written at an intelligence level that makes other books seem like pre school reading.
June 14, 2012
I will admit that there were days in the Bush era that I thought of expatriating. This book almost had me running out the door for my passport. Darn family obligations.....
Read
June 8, 2010Randall Robinson, founder of TransAfrica and the force behind the US disinvestment program to break apartheid in South Africa, emerged from that struggle a mortally wounded soul. His ability to help us break the back of institutionalized racism abroad left him unable to stomach the brokenness of his home: an America where racism has destroyed relationships between black people and land, black people and our history and culture, black people and each other.
Quitting America is Robinson's reflective journal, a place where he could disgorge this hurt, disgust and deep disillusionment. Written while in exile in his wife's homeland of St. Kitts, Robinson attempts to heal himself by spilling his rage and hopelessness onto the page. Although a widely read polymath and brilliant writer, Robinson's emotional purge would have required better editing to be more than personal catharsis. A sparkling phrase or insightful passage can be gleaned here and there, but this book is mostly a document of the destruction of a soul that dared to look directly into the face of racism -- and was nearly blinded.
As someone who does some diversity/cultural competency work, I read this book as a cautionary tale. As someone who deeply admires Robinson's work, I read it as a tribute. Were I neither, this book would be a hard read without redemption.
Quitting America is Robinson's reflective journal, a place where he could disgorge this hurt, disgust and deep disillusionment. Written while in exile in his wife's homeland of St. Kitts, Robinson attempts to heal himself by spilling his rage and hopelessness onto the page. Although a widely read polymath and brilliant writer, Robinson's emotional purge would have required better editing to be more than personal catharsis. A sparkling phrase or insightful passage can be gleaned here and there, but this book is mostly a document of the destruction of a soul that dared to look directly into the face of racism -- and was nearly blinded.
As someone who does some diversity/cultural competency work, I read this book as a cautionary tale. As someone who deeply admires Robinson's work, I read it as a tribute. Were I neither, this book would be a hard read without redemption.
May 26, 2008
Randall Robinson's poignant testaments validated how difficult it is to live with dignity in America. I'd admonish anyone who is too constructed white or black to not read Robinson's book. One must walk the path of a human to understand his message.
January 16, 2008
Tough Read but thoroughly enjoyed it. Eye opening perspective!!
January 5, 2014
I understand!
January 8, 2017
A frank critique of colonialism and its damage.
December 30, 2024
THE POWERFUL ADVOCATE OF REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY EXPLAINS HIS DEPARTURE
Author Randall Robinson wrote in the first chapter of this 2004 book, “Most white Americans in their dealings with black, brown, and all other varieties of nonwhite people are altogether well-mannered and are often all the more damaging for it. For indeed fine manners and America’s national opiate of choice, chauvinistic narcissism, combine to immunize white Americans en masse from self-knowledge, self-doubt, self-criticism. ‘If they don’t like us, it is only because they are jealous of us.’” (Pg. 5)
He continues, “I think when Americans say that America is the greatest country in the world, they mean only that it is the richest and most powerful, that their country meets all the ‘bigness’ tests, that Americans have more stuff than anybody else, and that they can just flat shoot everybody else’s lights out…. I don’t think they can mean that Americans are the happiest people in the world, or the most well-adjusted people in the world, or the most moral, or anything like that.” (Pg. 8)
He goes on, “In America, we have been conditioned with good reason to be wary of prisoners. Their wardens keep them away from civilians and under armed control, behind and beyond the prison walls, for fear that they will hurt us. We see them as alien and dangerous people, former human beings. America has more than two million such people now, half of them black. America… accounts for a quarter of the world’s prisoners, although it represents but a twentieth of the world’s population.” (Pg. 14)
He adds, “[I] needed to know things about who I was. A need felt in an earnest child’s breast all the more pressing because YOU had metronomically instructed my parents, and theirs, and theirs, that they and I had originated in a dark forest of savages. I hadn’t believed this… Not all of it, anyway, my tender child’s spirit fighting for its life much too early…before I scarcely knew what RACE was… long before, I learned that some would never even notice my humanity. Who could have done such a thing? What had I done to anyone on high by the small age of five?” (Pg. 17-18)
He recounts, “I was in … New York, for a speaking engagement when I walked smack into them not two blocks from my hotel... There are more than twenty of them, these Man-boys… They are slavery’s harvest… They look at me blankly without connection… No, money ain’t the real problem… But even should I try, I cannot explain this to the Man-boy looking at me, for we are not joined to each by any common memory… Nor can I find a common language with which to speak to his spirit, because some committee … had killed… his spirit and buried it under the rubble of the nation’s more pressing business. Man-boy once had a family but it was dismembered by slavery… He had a father but his father was run off without his manhood centuries ago… And he had a mother … for whom mothering under the weight of America could be likened to the futility of a salmon struggling … to spawn. He had a history… that began on a plain in Ethiopia when humans pulled themselves upright thousands upon thousands of years ago… How pointless it would be to tell him now … that the ancient Ethiopians were Christians when Europeans were pagans… I do not know what to say to him because I know of no other example … where millions of people from a single racial group had been stripped of everything … mother, father, child, property, language, culture, religion, freedom, dignity, and, sometimes, even genitalia. Now he is a menace to society.” (Pg. 19-21)
He notes, “Indeed America is the wealthiest country in the history of the world. Tiny, modest-living St. Kitts, however, is a healthier society. The suicide rate is nearly always higher in the mansion than in the bungalow… If a society produces large numbers of people who destroy themselves, that society cannot be described as successful… Well-adjusted people, people who… [know] how to simply BE don’t kill themselves… Only countries rent by civil war or fresh political upheaval are more violent than the United States… Americans only ask: WHO? Never: WHY?... From whence does all the generalized anger spring?” (Pg. 25-27) He asks, “Is it race, because of its conspicuous characteristics, that confuses us? Could it be that race is merely incidental to some more compelling but less palpable determinism?” (Pg. 49)
He wonders, “Was Clarence Thomas the biggest joke white America ever played on black America? ‘You want one? We got one for ya.’ No matter how many go-along-to-get-along blacks land seats in the president’s cabinet, America will always be a society of antagonistically opposed racial awarenesses. We will always be the majority’s afterthought, modified Americans… America will always leave Man-boy unexplained, won’t it?” (Pg. 83)
He says of the Iraq War, “There is NO acceptable justification for killing civilians or soldiers… when you are INVADING THEIR country. It is THEIR country and your reasons for assaulting it are globally assessed as specious… Go home, for God’s sake... before you wreck the community of nations and its undervalued house of assembly, the United Nations.” (Pg. 111) Later, he adds, “I had left America a year and a half before the war began, so the war had nothing to do with my reasons for leaving. The reasons are not easy to organize and write about… This refusal to examine, to look at itself at all, as would virtually the rest of the world, has produced … a collective national psychosis… protected by … an orchestrated self-adoration that only great power could insulate from effective critical assault.” (Pg. 138)
He recounts, “Hazel [his wife] and I … look at Khalea [their daughter]… We say at last to a white mother with whom we have been for years on friendly terms: ‘We have decided to leave America. We are moving to the Caribbean, to St. Kitts.’ The white mother … says to us: ‘But what are you going to do about Khalea? Where will she go to school?’ Had we not known before, we know now. We have made the right decision.” (Pg. 163-165)
He explains, “Hazel and I are not impetuous people. Our decision to leave America and move to the country of her birth and childhood was taken over a considerable period of time. I knew St. Kitts as well as any nonresident could… Though she is a naturalized American citizen, Hazel had always wished at some point to return home for good. My reasons for leaving America, of course, were different. I had always felt spiritually countryless. I belonged to the black world and not necessarily America… Leaving for me was easy.” (Pg. 174)
He continues, “America. Land of my birth and erstwhile distress. Hypocrite immemorial. My heart left long ago. At long last, I have followed it… how could I, in good conscience, remain FOR a country that has never ever, at home or abroad, been FOR me of FOR mine? I can remember… too terribly many depleting public policy occasions---segregation, reparations for slavery… police brutality, Haiti---I have fought for and with America’s creed---AGAINST America… I am all but spent by … A life now near used up contesting a fraud.” (Pg. 212-213)
After moving, he reflects, “I am sixty. I have come with Hazel and Khalea to live on a tiny island that only a small percentage of Americans seem to have ever heard of. Though it is arrestingly beautiful here… we did not come for the vistas alone. Nor was it alone because Hazel had grown up here and had never forgotten how the place had shaped her… No, I suppose there were larger reasons, some of which I have yet to puzzle out. One tiny thing seems clear enough however. We wanted to leave America with as much conviction as we wanted to come here. We arrived just three weeks before the World Trade Center towers were destroyed.” (Pg. 223)
He concludes, “I have only left America, and not the COUNTRY that I love---the country of Africans in America where my mother lives… [for] the country of unprepossessing civility where I now, for the first time, LIVE, spiritually free as never before; the COUNTRY of obsidian splendor and post-slavery privation; the COUNTRY of Africa’s issue and their story, then, now, and forever… I tried to love America… But I could not LOVE a place… Imagine a world of material wealth devoid of people. What’s to love? Nothing… I have tried to love America but America would not love an ancient, full African whole of me. Thus I could not love America… Then I stopped trying to love America… with it has come a measure of unexpected contentment… Warm and splendid and as old as time. Mislaid but valued all the more for its belated retrieval.” (Pg. 244-245)
This is a fascinating story; Robinson died in 2023, after living in St. Kitts for 22 years.
Author Randall Robinson wrote in the first chapter of this 2004 book, “Most white Americans in their dealings with black, brown, and all other varieties of nonwhite people are altogether well-mannered and are often all the more damaging for it. For indeed fine manners and America’s national opiate of choice, chauvinistic narcissism, combine to immunize white Americans en masse from self-knowledge, self-doubt, self-criticism. ‘If they don’t like us, it is only because they are jealous of us.’” (Pg. 5)
He continues, “I think when Americans say that America is the greatest country in the world, they mean only that it is the richest and most powerful, that their country meets all the ‘bigness’ tests, that Americans have more stuff than anybody else, and that they can just flat shoot everybody else’s lights out…. I don’t think they can mean that Americans are the happiest people in the world, or the most well-adjusted people in the world, or the most moral, or anything like that.” (Pg. 8)
He goes on, “In America, we have been conditioned with good reason to be wary of prisoners. Their wardens keep them away from civilians and under armed control, behind and beyond the prison walls, for fear that they will hurt us. We see them as alien and dangerous people, former human beings. America has more than two million such people now, half of them black. America… accounts for a quarter of the world’s prisoners, although it represents but a twentieth of the world’s population.” (Pg. 14)
He adds, “[I] needed to know things about who I was. A need felt in an earnest child’s breast all the more pressing because YOU had metronomically instructed my parents, and theirs, and theirs, that they and I had originated in a dark forest of savages. I hadn’t believed this… Not all of it, anyway, my tender child’s spirit fighting for its life much too early…before I scarcely knew what RACE was… long before, I learned that some would never even notice my humanity. Who could have done such a thing? What had I done to anyone on high by the small age of five?” (Pg. 17-18)
He recounts, “I was in … New York, for a speaking engagement when I walked smack into them not two blocks from my hotel... There are more than twenty of them, these Man-boys… They are slavery’s harvest… They look at me blankly without connection… No, money ain’t the real problem… But even should I try, I cannot explain this to the Man-boy looking at me, for we are not joined to each by any common memory… Nor can I find a common language with which to speak to his spirit, because some committee … had killed… his spirit and buried it under the rubble of the nation’s more pressing business. Man-boy once had a family but it was dismembered by slavery… He had a father but his father was run off without his manhood centuries ago… And he had a mother … for whom mothering under the weight of America could be likened to the futility of a salmon struggling … to spawn. He had a history… that began on a plain in Ethiopia when humans pulled themselves upright thousands upon thousands of years ago… How pointless it would be to tell him now … that the ancient Ethiopians were Christians when Europeans were pagans… I do not know what to say to him because I know of no other example … where millions of people from a single racial group had been stripped of everything … mother, father, child, property, language, culture, religion, freedom, dignity, and, sometimes, even genitalia. Now he is a menace to society.” (Pg. 19-21)
He notes, “Indeed America is the wealthiest country in the history of the world. Tiny, modest-living St. Kitts, however, is a healthier society. The suicide rate is nearly always higher in the mansion than in the bungalow… If a society produces large numbers of people who destroy themselves, that society cannot be described as successful… Well-adjusted people, people who… [know] how to simply BE don’t kill themselves… Only countries rent by civil war or fresh political upheaval are more violent than the United States… Americans only ask: WHO? Never: WHY?... From whence does all the generalized anger spring?” (Pg. 25-27) He asks, “Is it race, because of its conspicuous characteristics, that confuses us? Could it be that race is merely incidental to some more compelling but less palpable determinism?” (Pg. 49)
He wonders, “Was Clarence Thomas the biggest joke white America ever played on black America? ‘You want one? We got one for ya.’ No matter how many go-along-to-get-along blacks land seats in the president’s cabinet, America will always be a society of antagonistically opposed racial awarenesses. We will always be the majority’s afterthought, modified Americans… America will always leave Man-boy unexplained, won’t it?” (Pg. 83)
He says of the Iraq War, “There is NO acceptable justification for killing civilians or soldiers… when you are INVADING THEIR country. It is THEIR country and your reasons for assaulting it are globally assessed as specious… Go home, for God’s sake... before you wreck the community of nations and its undervalued house of assembly, the United Nations.” (Pg. 111) Later, he adds, “I had left America a year and a half before the war began, so the war had nothing to do with my reasons for leaving. The reasons are not easy to organize and write about… This refusal to examine, to look at itself at all, as would virtually the rest of the world, has produced … a collective national psychosis… protected by … an orchestrated self-adoration that only great power could insulate from effective critical assault.” (Pg. 138)
He recounts, “Hazel [his wife] and I … look at Khalea [their daughter]… We say at last to a white mother with whom we have been for years on friendly terms: ‘We have decided to leave America. We are moving to the Caribbean, to St. Kitts.’ The white mother … says to us: ‘But what are you going to do about Khalea? Where will she go to school?’ Had we not known before, we know now. We have made the right decision.” (Pg. 163-165)
He explains, “Hazel and I are not impetuous people. Our decision to leave America and move to the country of her birth and childhood was taken over a considerable period of time. I knew St. Kitts as well as any nonresident could… Though she is a naturalized American citizen, Hazel had always wished at some point to return home for good. My reasons for leaving America, of course, were different. I had always felt spiritually countryless. I belonged to the black world and not necessarily America… Leaving for me was easy.” (Pg. 174)
He continues, “America. Land of my birth and erstwhile distress. Hypocrite immemorial. My heart left long ago. At long last, I have followed it… how could I, in good conscience, remain FOR a country that has never ever, at home or abroad, been FOR me of FOR mine? I can remember… too terribly many depleting public policy occasions---segregation, reparations for slavery… police brutality, Haiti---I have fought for and with America’s creed---AGAINST America… I am all but spent by … A life now near used up contesting a fraud.” (Pg. 212-213)
After moving, he reflects, “I am sixty. I have come with Hazel and Khalea to live on a tiny island that only a small percentage of Americans seem to have ever heard of. Though it is arrestingly beautiful here… we did not come for the vistas alone. Nor was it alone because Hazel had grown up here and had never forgotten how the place had shaped her… No, I suppose there were larger reasons, some of which I have yet to puzzle out. One tiny thing seems clear enough however. We wanted to leave America with as much conviction as we wanted to come here. We arrived just three weeks before the World Trade Center towers were destroyed.” (Pg. 223)
He concludes, “I have only left America, and not the COUNTRY that I love---the country of Africans in America where my mother lives… [for] the country of unprepossessing civility where I now, for the first time, LIVE, spiritually free as never before; the COUNTRY of obsidian splendor and post-slavery privation; the COUNTRY of Africa’s issue and their story, then, now, and forever… I tried to love America… But I could not LOVE a place… Imagine a world of material wealth devoid of people. What’s to love? Nothing… I have tried to love America but America would not love an ancient, full African whole of me. Thus I could not love America… Then I stopped trying to love America… with it has come a measure of unexpected contentment… Warm and splendid and as old as time. Mislaid but valued all the more for its belated retrieval.” (Pg. 244-245)
This is a fascinating story; Robinson died in 2023, after living in St. Kitts for 22 years.
January 31, 2016
I did not finish this book. I picked it up as a Black History Month read in February. I'm sure the book has a good underlying moral message about the effects of racism on people and communities. But his presentation really irked me.
Two chapters in and he created a dichotomy between the Black American and the White American and stereotyped the White American to be racist. It seemed like a very hypocritical approach to me, so I stopped reading it.
Two chapters in and he created a dichotomy between the Black American and the White American and stereotyped the White American to be racist. It seemed like a very hypocritical approach to me, so I stopped reading it.
August 10, 2008
Yikes. Informative, yet jaded. I wanted insight into the culture I would experience in St. Kitts Nevis and I got an ear full. I admit I skipped a couple of hateful chapters. I was glad to understand his point of view. I highly disagree with it though. Both St. Kitts Nevis and the United States are wonderful countries. They each have strengths and weaknesses.
Read
January 4, 2008This book is very good but takes concentration because it almost reads like a history book (i'm exaggerating). Will pick back up later because I'm on Christmas break and I don't like reading too many books that require the same amount of thinking as my textbooks! I will read this summer.
January 11, 2011
**** Incredibly interesting. Robinson looks at America, white America, with an unflinching eye cutting to the heart and taking no prisoners. Eye opening and packed with rare information. A MUST READ!
Currently Reading
August 27, 2012I love it so far. It's real and up front.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews