Time to Go?

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I am listening to the State of the Union address, and I find myself confronting a hard truth: for people of color especially Black people this country no longer feels like home. If I am honest, perhaps it never truly was.

The chamber tells its own story. Brown faces and Black faces are sparse, this time intentionally as a form of resistance and protest. Whiteness drapes itself in red, white, and blue. The chants “USA! USA!” ring with a certainty that has never fully included us. And the refrain, “We will not go back,” echoes from the 47. Yet for many of us, the deeper fear is this: we are not being invited forward either.

What unsettles me most is not merely policy. It is mythology. For over 250 years, America has rehearsed a narrative of exceptionalism that erases the labor, intellect, innovation, and blood of Black bodies. A greatness proclaimed as self-made that was, in truth, extracted. A confidence built on conquest, colonization, patriarchy, Christian nationalism, and manifest destiny. The lie is not only historical it is devotional. It has been believed, defended, and sanctified.

So the question presses: Where do we go from here?

For some of us, the question is no longer metaphorical. It feels literal. If this is not home as hard as we tried to make it. And when are communities were strong and independent that are intentionally disacrated places like Tulsa, the Atlanta Race Riots (1906), Rosewood, and Wilmington to name a few.  Is it time to revisit again another exodus what does it mean to leave? The last exodus took us to Nova Scotia and Liberia. What does it mean to imagine repatriation? Not as escapism, but as moral claim.

We were promised forty acres and a mule. That promise was never honored. If justice were serious, it would calculate the present value of that theft. It would fund the descendants of enslaved Africans who choose to reestablish themselves elsewhere in Africa, the Caribbean, South America wherever dignity and self-determination might be more attainable. Repatriation would not be abandonment; it would be redress.

I know many will resist this idea. Some will say, “This is our land. Our ancestors built it.” And you would be right. They did build it, from the White House to the outhouse, we did that! They built it without wages, without protection, without inheritance. Their fingerprints are in the soil and in the Constitution’s contradictions.

Part of me hopes you will argue with me. I want someone to insist that I am wrong that there is still a future here worth fighting for. But what I witnessed half a Congress applauding what I cannot reconcile with the God of justice, the dignity of humanity, or the ethics of truth forces a harder theological question: Whose God? Whose humanity? Whose dignity?

Black people do not need to wrestle with those questions in the same way. We have already lived the consequences. It is White America that must wrestle with them now and with the generational consequences of its choices. Scripture speaks of the sins of the fathers visiting the children. History confirms it.

As Black History Month closes, I find myself returning to James Weldon Johnson’s hymn, Lift Every Voice and Sing:

“Stony the road we trod,Bitter the chastening rod,Felt in the days when hope unborn had died…”

We have survived hope deferred before. But survival is not the same as belonging.

If hope in America feels diminished, then perhaps we must cultivate hope elsewhere or redefine it altogether. Perhaps “home” must become less geographic and more sovereign. Less national and more communal. Less mythic and more truthful.

I do not declare America dead. But I do grieve the version of it that might have been. And grief, if it is honest, demands clarity.

If this is not home, then we must decide:Do we leave?Do we rebuild?Or do we redefine what home has always meant?

That is the real State of the Union.