Tiffanie Drayton was four years old when her mother took her and her two siblings from their Santa Cruz home to live in the US, with the hope of giving them a better life.

Over two decades later, tired of chasing the “myth” that is the American dream, Drayton returned to TT, fleeing the systematic racism she encountered in the US.

The details of her experiences are documented in her recently published book, Black American Refugee: Escaping the Narcissism of the American Dream.

“The book pretty much tells the story of me moving to the US with my mom, sister and brother. She was a single parent. It tells about all that we had to do to constantly fight just to gain access to good housing and a proper education,” Drayton told WMN in a Zoom interview.

[caption id="attachment_946817" align="alignnone" width="958"] The cover of Black American Refugee: Escaping the Narcissism of the American Dream by Tiffanie Drayton. -[/caption]

The book is an expansion of an essay she had written after George Floyd was murdered in 2020, sparking the Black Lives Matter movement. The essay was titled I’m a Black American. I Had to Get Out, and was published in the Opinion section of the New York Times.

“Black American Refugee really just details the experiences I had as a young black girl and a black woman in the US – experiences that really illuminate what the hold of systemic racism is like on an average black family. And it also secondarily looks at the theme of narcissistic abuse running throughout.”

Drayton, a journalist by profession, returned to TT in 2013 with her sister and her seven-year-old nephew.

“At the time my sister found a little private school in Tobago that she liked, and it was affordable. We decided to move there so he could have access to that school.”

But she hadn’t yet severed all ties with the US, and moved back and forth between her two homes. She had two children with her then partner, whom she describes as an “abusive narcissist,” and said for years she was trapped in an abusive cycle with him. She was eventually able to get out of it with the intervention of family, friends and therapy.

In 2019, she packed her things, took her children and settled in Tobago.

Once the blinkers were off, she was able to see the many abusive similarities between her relationships with her ex and with the US.

[caption id="attachment_946819" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Tiffanie Drayton with one of her children in Tobago. -[/caption]

Drayton said sometimes explaining systematic racism can be problematic because some people view it through the lens of prejudice.

“But it is bigger than prejudice. When you’re dealing with systemic racism, there are policies in place, there are specific ways of governing society to make it so that you cannot have a good, decent life.”

She said one of the things that really had an impact on her family was policy on accessing affordable housing.

“In America there are so many policies that make it difficult for black people to have access to good, affordable housing, es