My Grandmother Would Have Left: Black America and the Sunk-Cost Fallacy
The sunk-cost fallacy is the tendency to hold onto something because of the time, effort, and resources already invested, even when letting go would be the better choice. It’s why someone you know stays in that relationship that pulls them apart like ants and vultures and flies on a deer carcass. Like wallpaper or an ankle scab or our ecosystem. It’s why that one friend keeps pouring money into a car that’s riding on a balding spare and a prayer. It’s a beautifully laid, seductive trap that convinces us to prioritize what we’ve already lost over what we could still gain.
The danger of the sunk-cost fallacy lies in its ability to keep us tethered to things we’ve moved beyond. It tricks us into believing that abandoning our investments means failure when, in reality, it often means freedom. By clinging to what we’ve already spent — time, money, or emotional energy — we risk losing even more. The fallacy blinds us to the potential of what could be and keeps us trapped in cycles of harm, simply because we’ve already paid the price of admission.
I think about this often when it comes to my siblings, cousins, aunties, play cousins, and every other [proud-to-be] Black person in America and our relationship to the country itself. For generations, we — our folks, their mamas, their mama’s mamas — infused labor and lives into a place that has continually refused to acknowledge our full personhood. It’s no wonder many of us feel we can’t walk away. Perhaps, for some, it’s the unrelenting need for recognition, the hope that one day the country will truly see us and acknowledge the depth of our contributions.
I’ve practically begged those who can leave America to do so, only to hear, “My grandparents helped build this country. I gotta stay to see this thing through,” or “This is as much our land as it is theirs.” I understand them deeply because I, too, have felt the weight of ancestral sacrifice. I still do. How could I not? Generations of Black folks carving out lives under the crushing weight of constraint and despotism. To leave can feel like betrayal, an abandonment of all they endured to simply see their lives and every part of them through
But I also know this: had our ancestors been presented with the opportunity to leave, to find respite from the daily dehumanization, many of them would have taken it. If not for their sanity, or for their self-preservation, absolutely for their children. My grandmother, a woman who gave so much of herself to a city that tried to erase her through what they called “urban renewal,” died before I even considered making another country home, but I can hear her voice — proud, slightly hesitant — saying, “Go. Find you a house where you can breathe. And when you can, send for me so I can dance there.”
Her words — imagined, but true — haunt me. They remind me that liberation doesn’t always look like fighting until your knuckles are raw and swollen and you’re gasping for the air that’s been kicked out of you — first from your lungs, then your throat. Sometimes, it looks like stepping away, building a new life, choosing joy over justice that may never come. But damn, all those aching knucklebones and all those funerals and here some of us sit, trapped in cycles of suffering, bound by invisible chains of obligation.
And yet, for those who stay, who choose to fight, there is no shame. There is love in that, too. But love must also make room for freedom. For letting our imaginations run beyond the borders of what we’ve known. For seeing ourselves not just as survivors but as humans worthy of a life well-lived, wherever that life might unfold.
The sunk-cost fallacy screams that walking away is weakness. That leaving means giving up on what could have been. But the truth is, leaving is sometimes the most dauntless thing we can do. It’s a declaration that our lives, our minds, and our joy are worth more than any investment we’ve made in this trash heap. Sometimes, especially when it comes to America, letting go isn’t losing. It’s winning a life our grandaddy ‘nem never thought was possible.
