FLY BROTHER Is Back!

FLY BROTHER is back!

We may have been delayed by weather, mechanical issues, and passenger skirmishes, but we’re ready for departure.

I started FLY BROTHER as a blog ten years ago while I was living as an expat in Colombia. It was an easy way of keeping the folks back home abreast of my life in Latin America, while encouraging people to get outside of their comfort zones and travel more. Back then, my fellow long-term travelers and I were outliers bucking conformity, so we thought. Many of us travelers of color had only rudimentary social networks (hello, MySpace!), books by a few trailblazers, and our own personal experiences to guide us through the world.

In the past decade, things have changed, obviously. Instagram and glitch fares helped spark the “Black Travel Movement” and other surges in international travel. Awareness and priorities have shifted as more and more people have learned that they, too, belong out in the world. I’ve changed, too.

For me, this past decade has been about constant growth—replete with growth spurts and growing pains—as I’ve had to navigate life, love, health, wealth, business, pleasure, and Instagram Stories (and I still don’t know how to add music). In ten years, I moved from Colombia to Brazil to Germany to the USA to South Africa to the USA. My country count has surpassed 70. I shifted careers from educator to journalist to storyteller (which can mean anything I want it to). But my biggest shift of all has been ownership: the ownership of all my talents, gifts, abilities, fears, faults, insecurities, blessings. Ownership of my power.

But what does that mean? For me, it means becoming executive producer and host of FLY BROTHER with Ernest White II, a television travel docu-series about friendship and connection debuting on PBS in January 2020. It means emceeing the historic Pavillon Afriques during the Festival de Cannes this past May. It means my stage debut as Toledo in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom next month in San Francisco. It means a Get Fly Get-Together happening in a city near you. It means re-launching the FLY BROTHER RADIO SHOW and, of course, the FLY BROTHER blog. It means surprise destinations and exciting stop-overs. It means expansion, possibility, opportunity. It means intrigue, adventure, romance. It means much more than the price of the ticket.

So, please fasten your seatbelts. Make sure your seatbacks and tray-tables are in their upright and locked positions. We’re ready for take-off.

Thank you for flying with me.

-Ernest White II
FLY BROTHER