Immigration is top of mind for Americans, as President Trump began cracking down on border control almost immediately after being sworn into office. But the borders between the U.S. and the nations to our south aren’t the only ones we need to worry about. State legislation is reshaping our internal borders along partisan lines, creating refugees fleeing from hate, and states to which they cannot safely return.
I teach critical race feminism, and I am a critical legal scholar. I am also a hate refugee. I left my job in Georgia, because what I teach prompted members of my then-university community to speak acts of violence and challenge my sense of safety in the classroom. The defining event that precipitated my departure was when a white, female campus police officer threatened me and a speaker for a Critical Race Theory campus event, both of us Black women. She stopped us on the way to the speaking venue. We were running late, and I said to the officer “Hi! We need to get to the presidential dining room where she (motioning to my passenger) is the keynote speaker.” The officer placed her hand on her gun and replied, “You need to? Or you need me to let you?” After that incident, my family and I decided it was time to move.
Shortly before the 2016 presidential election, I recall walking the streets of my neighborhood to get a sense of how my neighbors were voting. As I walked down each street, it seemed that my neighbors’ lawn signs reflected the angst my friends and I were experiencing as we pondered the future of the country.
We all know how that future turned out. It is the specter of that outcome that haunted the 2024 Presidential election, the inauguration activities, and that is now a waking nightmare for those who stand against divisiveness and hate. While many believe that the rhetoric of the 47th president and his party is hyperbolic and not cause for alarm, those of us who are Black, brown, women, gay, trans, physically challenged, immigrants, unhoused, and members of any other marginalized group are afraid for our safety and our futures. This past election did not feel like a simple disagreement about political ideology. On the contrary, this election felt like a question: Is the United States a country that is comfortable with any group who is not rich, white, male and straight making gains?
The ballot, or more accurately the Electoral College, answered no. Making America Great Again means reminding women and the minoritized of our place again. And that place is back in the margins.
Instead of focusing on the cruelty and indifference that is to come over the next four years, it is our charge to focus on what we can do in our communities and networks to advance our multiracial democracy. We must reject any rhetoric that links America’s ills with racism and xenophobia as simplistic and challenge ourselves to see the humanity in each person that we encounter. Our vision must be contextual and historical if we are to understand who we are as a nation and how we got to this present moment.
We now live in a country where teachers who want to teach accurate accounts of history, science and literature from varied perspectives can only do so in the states that have eschewed book bans and attempts to subvert curricula. Over half of the states in the U.S. have either anti-Critical Race Theory legislation, divisive concepts legislation, book bans or all three.
Furthermore, abortion providers and those seeking abortions can only do so without threat of prosecution in slightly more than half of the U.S. Effectively, this means that our freedom of movement in the country is limited based on which rights we are willing to forego.
Parents seeking diverse and inclusive educational experiences for their children are restricted to half the country. Professors who do not wish to cede control of their courses to state legislatures can only search for career opportunities in a smattering of states. Women who desire full access to healthcare, including reproductive healthcare, can do so only within the nooks and crannies of a disjointed U.S. map that rivals the maps of the most creatively gerrymandered districts.
Americans who want the full rights promised to us in the Constitution, and by our lived experiences of the last 50 years, now must travel the 21st Century version of an Underground Railroad. We risk departure from states that meet our needs with violence or neglect to be carried by networks of mutual aid to other states that offer different freedoms even as we remain the same.
For as many of us who flee, there are those who choose to stay. Whether connected to place and space by kinship, friendships, or just plain stubbornness, residents of the beleaguered states stay to vote, to fight, to organize, to nurture, to resist. While they are needed and appreciated where they stand, their presence alone cannot change how state and federal laws restrict who can be called to fight alongside them and how they are even allowed to fight. They may not be hate refugees, but they are hate hostages.
Authoritarian regimes have only one border: the border between us and them. This particular border crisis in which we find ourselves threatens to separate us from our neighbors and put all of our notions of freedom in a cage.
