Where do the Black people go in Austin?
I’ve seen this question pop up online more times than I can count. People saying there aren’t enough Black people here. Saying there’s no Black culture. Telling others they need to move to [redacted city]. Others push back, saying the Black people are here, we just don’t go out like that, or you have to follow certain pages, join certain groups, know where to look. Someone mentions a walking group on the weekends. Someone else lists events like a running thread you have to piece together yourself. The responses overlap, contradict, circle back. It never lands in one clear answer.
When I moved to Austin in 2022, I didn’t realize how much I would have to adjust to what Black presence and belonging looked like here. I think I was looking for something that would feel familiar right away, something I wouldn’t have to search too hard to find.
The first Black-curated event I went to was All Kinds of Black in Tech in January of 2023. I was not in tech, but I was working with undergraduate STEM students at the time, and I wanted to be in the room. It was held at the Central Library. The space itself was beautiful, open and bright, people moving through it with intention.
I moved through slowly, taking it in. There was art throughout the space, and I remember lingering near it, just standing with it for a while. At some point, a photographer asked if I wanted to take portraits, and I said yes. She was kind, patient, easy to talk to, and the photos she took that night ended up being the first headshots of myself that I actually liked. I still use them to this day.
I met two people that night. We ended up walking a few blocks over to get sushi, talking about being new in the city and what it feels like to figure out where you fit inside it.
We didn’t stay in touch for long. Still, I remember leaving feeling proud of myself for going, for choosing to show up.
That summer I went to an event hosted by Torch Literary Arts where writers from a retreat were sharing their work. One of them had been my writing mentor during lockdown, someone I had only known virtually until that night.
The space felt warm and inviting in a way I had not experienced yet in Austin, thoughtfully put together from beginning to end. The readings, the conversations, the way people settled into the room all moved with a kind of care that was easy to feel but hard to name.
I remember sitting there thinking this is what I had been looking for. It stayed with me, even as my relationship to the city remained unchanged. I did not leave with a sense that anything had resolved or shifted in a lasting way, only a clearer awareness of what I was noticing when I entered spaces like that, and what I was still learning to look for.
What I had thought of as “community” felt closer to proximity than anything else, who I was near, what I had access to, the parts of the city I frequented, and the parts I rarely reached. Living in one area meant there were entire pockets of life I was not inside of, not because they were hidden, but because I wasn’t close enough to them yet.
I started to realize I had missed what I did not see, or maybe I just hadn’t been close enough for it to register yet.
Even now, I think about the work that goes into the spaces I’ve entered, the planning, the intention, the small details that shape how a room feels. I used to think I was being critical when I noticed what was missing, but it wasn't a critique. It was recognition that care shows up in the details.
I started piecing together impressions of the city through conversations and small exchanges. Some arrive expecting something already in motion. Others begin shaping what’s there through what they host, what they return to, and what they keep consistent. Sometimes it is something new, sometimes it is a response to what feels missing, sometimes it is a repetition of something already familiar. Over time, those experiences started to sound familiar across conversations.
In those same conversations, I kept hearing different ways people described being present in the city. Some show up every week, some once a month, some only when something draws them out and across the city. Some build spaces, some move between them. It doesn’t show up in just one way.
What I was looking for wasn’t just events. It was ease, the ability to move through a day and encounter things that feel familiar without having to search for them, to take a class, walk into a tea shop, a café, or a studio, to be in spaces where I am not constantly wondering if I belong or if I will be recognized.
That doesn’t happen all at once. It builds slowly, through repetition, through proximity, through people showing up again and again, even when the spaces are temporary, even when things are uneven.
Austin may never look the way it once did for the people who remember it differently, but it is becoming something new.
And whatever it becomes will come from the people who stay, gather, create, and make space for something to exist here at all.
Belonging isn’t something we inherit in a way that stays fixed. It shifts with what remains, what gets displaced, and what we continue building in its place.