A retreat in Costa Rica is offering black women the chance to spend their vacation free from white people, as showcased in a new documentary by Vice News.
“At a time when white supremacist groups march out in the open, and the president disparages African countries as shitholes, it’s not surprising many black Americans are feeling isolated and unsafe in communities and workplaces,” says the Vice News article.
Andrea X, an expatriate who gave up her life in Brooklyn to create the Women of Color Healing Retreat in Puerto Viejo in 2014, said she had a hard time communicating with white people in the U.S. without focusing on their constant “micro-aggressions” and “passive-aggressiveness.”
The Women of Color Healing Retreat is a 10-day travel experience emphasizes yoga, vegan food, and political education seminars — and specifically banned white people.
“I decided one day to just eliminate white people from my personal life, and ever since then my life has been way more breezy,” she told Vice.
Andrea X said she envisions a “safe space” free from the oppression of white people and believes white Americans shouldn’t be able to travel outside their own country. “I feel like white people shouldn’t even have passports,” she said, laughing. “They need to stay in the United States.”
The retreat is currently held at a white-owned resort, but Andrea X and a business partner have invested US$100,000 to build their own black-only retreat space about 20 minutes away.
Vice News traveled to the retreat to get a first-hand look at how it operates and discovered hundreds of thousands of dollars were being spent on locations to facilitate completely white-free communities.
This segment originally aired February 5, 2018, on VICE News Tonight on HBO.
