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The roughly 85% of Black Americans who did not support Trump in 2024 have long been asking themselves where they’d go if they had to leave the United States. If houses still had parlors, that question would have been something of a parlor game by now.
But that game is becoming more serious with every passing week, with every passing headline. The question now is: where’s the line between alarmism and prescience?
There were Chileans in the early 1970s, leftists and intellectuals, who sensed the danger of Pinochet but remained in their homeland and were disappeared. In 1970s Cambodia, not everyone was blind to the danger of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Many of those who sensed the danger and tried to fight it were rounded up and killed. The same can be said of Tutsi in Rwanda, who were slaughtered when the rival Hutu came to power in the early 1990s.
These were historic, apocalyptic crimes against humanity, and there is no evidence that Trump is planning such actions against Black Americans, now or in the future.
A return to intractable second-class citizenship for Black Americans, however, very much does seem at least possible. Already, the administration has signaled to police departments that violence against Black citizens will not be met with federal consequences. Already, Black leaders in the military and academia have been targeted and dismissed. Already, accounts of Black contributions to the country are being shushed, re-written or deleted.
Given those realities, what’s the tripwire, the tipping point that says it’s time to move from contemplating departure to actively planning it? And what does departure look and feel like?
There are no simple answers, no obvious safe harbors. Emigrating, as many Black Americans who really looked into it now know, is not at all easy. Many countries require a long period of residency before they’d even consider offering a path to citizenship. Who can leave their home, their job, set up shop in another country and earn enough long enough to make a viable request for citizenship?
And there’s the argument that Frederick Douglass didn’t rattle those 19th century cages so his people, a century and a half later, could simply bolt when times got hard again. Would leaving be a slap in the face of John Lewis, who was savagely beaten so his people would have equal rights in this country? Would it insult the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was murdered in his push for equality here? Would it insult the memory of relatives who fought and died in this country’s wars?
These are the questions quietly being asked by Black Americans in family and friend chat groups. Stay or go? Now? When? How? The questions mount, and, somewhere unseen but loudly heard, a clock ticks.
Straight From 
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