Randall Robinson.

• Author: Pal, Amitabh
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

Randall Robinson is a disillusioned man. So much so that he decided to leave the United States in 2001 and settle down in St. Kitts, where his wife is from. He has written a book, Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man from His Native Land, explaining the reasons for his relocation. Robinson hasn't completely quit the United States, though. He still maintains a home in Virginia and comes back often for visits.

A lifelong activist, Robinson is best known as the founder of TransAfrica Forum, an organization he established in 1977 to push U.S. policy toward Africa and the Caribbean in a more progressive direction. He has also been in the forefront of the reparations debate, having written The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks.

Robinson was born in 1941 in segregated Richmond, Virginia. His father was a schoolteacher and coach. After dropping out of college for a brief stint in the army, Robinson graduated from Virginia Union University and then got accepted into Harvard Law School. When he finished, he went to Africa to support the liberation movements there. Upon returning, he worked for the next few years as a legal aid lawyer and community organizer in Boston. In September 1977, Robinson launched TransAfrica in Washington, D.C. Through his organization, Robinson lobbied against the white regime in South Africa and sought to end U.S. support for dictatorial governments elsewhere in Africa and the Caribbean. Among his actions: Robinson organized a sit-in of the South African embassy, went on a hunger strike to urge U.S. intervention to restore democracy in Haiti, and dumped a ton of bananas on the steps of the U.S. trade representative's office to protest U.S. trade policy toward the Caribbean. Robinson finally announced his retirement from TransAfrica in December 2001.

I met Robinson in February at the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta, where he had come to participate in a conference on the role of the religious leadership in the African American community. We sat down at the hotel card and spoke for more than an hour.

Q: Why did you decide to leave the United States?

Randall Robinson: I was really worn down by an American society that is racist, smugly blind to it, and hugely self-satisfied. I wanted to live in a place where that wasn't always a distorting weight. Black people in America have to, for their own protection, develop a defense mechanism, and I just grew terribly tired of it. When you sustain that kind of affront, and sustain it and sustain it and sustain it, something happens to you. You try to steer a course in American society that's not self-destructive. But America is a country that inflicts injury. It does not like to see anything that comes in response, and accuses one of anger as if it were an unnatural response. For anyone who is not white in America, the affronts are virtually across the board.

When we lived here, we accommodated ourselves to the most extraordinary things. I just didn't think that was the way to live. I wanted to be in another place.

We also have a daughter who was eleven at the time. We wanted her to have a normal, fun adolescence, and it was just undoable. When we lived here and went to a shopping center or someplace, we'd tell our daughter, do not get out of our line of sight. Now she's in a place where she can walk...