It's been 33 years since I was last in Austin. Looks like things haven't change much since... [View all]

[MrScorpio]

What It’s Like to Be Black in Austin
By JOSHUNDA SANDERS

MARCH 22, 2018


I am good at leaving places, but it was hard to leave Austin.

In 2005, I moved to Austin from San Francisco to work as a reporter at The Austin American Statesman and to attend graduate school at the University of Texas. I am a native New Yorker, but somehow I fell in love with Austin: with the open sky and the people I worked with, with my fellow Longhorns, with Torchy’s breakfast tacos, queso and good margaritas.

I bought a house and thought I might stay for five years. I lived there for eight, the longest I have lived anywhere at a stretch.

I left in 2013 for a lot of reasons. I started to realize that in a place like Texas, you needed kin, but I lost mine. In the space of two years, I lost both my parents, one to suicide, the other to cancer. In my grief, I tried to write through it, but it was more than I could power through alone.

And in Austin, I felt a loneliness that was hard to explain. I wasn’t just a New Yorker in Texas. I was a tall, dark-skinned black woman with natural hair. I was an outsider in a place that is supposed to value weirdness, but I never felt like the right kind of weird.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/22/opinion/joshunda-sanders-black-austin-bombing.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=What%20it%27s%20like%20to%20be%20Black%20in%20Austin&utm_campaign=OOR%20-%203.23.18