Does leaving the United States mean giving up your claim to reparations? Halisi Vinson and Ric Crawley of Our Black Utopia, who’ve lived in Lisbon for four years, tackled that exact question head-on, arguing that reparations and moving abroad aren’t remotely in conflict. Their case rests on one core distinction: reparations are a legal claim against the U.S. government, not a reward for staying put.
Slavery Was an Economic System First
Vinson opened with a distinction she credits to Nikole Hannah-Jones: slavery gets discussed as a racist institution, but it was fundamentally an economic one. Enslaved people’s labor was stolen and redistributed as wealth to others, and racism functioned as the justification, not the underlying mechanism. That extraction, she argued, didn’t stop when slavery ended, it simply changed form through Black codes, Jim Crow, and housing discrimination.
This is the same throughline we’ve traced in our coverage of Dr. William Darity’s work on reparations eligibility, where he makes an almost identical case: reparations claims trace back to specific, documented economic harm, not abstract racial grievance.
The Government Built the Wealth Gap on Paper
Crawley walked through exactly how federal policy manufactured residential segregation, pointing to redlining, where the federal government literally marked Black neighborhoods as bad investment risk, and the Federal Housing Administration’s refusal to insure mortgages in those same neighborhoods. He cited Levittown, New York, the first major postwar suburb, where FHA-backed loans required racially restrictive covenants explicitly barring Black buyers, a documented practice confirmed by newspaper investigations decades later.
The point, as Crawley put it, is that this wasn’t “somebody’s granddaddy” refusing to sell his house. It was codified government policy, de jure segregation, not neighbors sorting themselves informally.
Who Actually Owes the Debt
Vinson was direct about who the reparations claim targets: the United States government, not individual white families. “The government protected slavery. The government enforced racial apartheid,” she said. Because wealth compounds across generations, primarily through home equity passed down or borrowed against, the exclusion from that system compounds too, creating a gap that widens with each generation rather than closing on its own.
That argument mirrors what we’ve heard from ADOS organizer Yvette Carnell in our earlier coverage of the ADOS reparations framework: the debt is inherited, and inheritance doesn’t require the original holder to still be alive, or the claimant to still be standing on American soil.
Why Your Address Doesn’t Cancel the Debt
Vinson and Crawley directly addressed comments accusing Black expats of “abandoning” their reparations claim by moving abroad. Their counter is straightforward: if a debt is owed to you in one location and you relocate, the debt doesn’t disappear, it simply follows you. They noted they remain U.S. citizens, still vote, still pay U.S. taxes, and still own property domestically, distinguishing expatriation from renunciation of citizenship entirely.
They also drew a direct line to the Great Migration, when millions of Black Americans left the South for cities like Chicago without anyone framing that move as abandoning ancestral claims. “The map is just bigger now,” Vinson said, extending that same logic to Lisbon, Accra, or Medellín.
5 Key Takeaways
- Reparations are a legal claim, not a residency requirement. The debt is owed by the U.S. government, and moving abroad doesn’t dissolve that obligation.
- Slavery’s harm was economic first, racial second. Racism justified wealth extraction that continued through redlining and housing discrimination long after emancipation.
- Levittown is a documented example of government-enforced segregation. FHA-backed loans required racial covenants that explicitly excluded Black buyers.
- Staying in the U.S. isn’t inherently activism. Vinson and Crawley argue organizing, voting, and institution-building matter more than physical location.
- Citizenship and residency are separate from reparations eligibility. Living abroad while remaining a U.S. citizen doesn’t affect a lineage-based reparations claim.
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