Edwidge Danticat’s essay begins with her trip to Haiti near the border of the Dominican Republic, which had suddenly driven away many Haitian refugees. Danticat and her friends survey the dusty refugee camps filled with hungry people waiting for food from a church outreach. This trip occurs around the year anniversary of Michael Brown’s fatal shooting by police officer Darren Wilson, an event commemorated by attorney Raha Jorjani in The Washington Post.

Referencing the deaths of unarmed black Americans like Tamir Rice and Sandra Bland, Jorjani’s op-ed suggests that the United States treats African Americans like refugees and that the law gives refugees the right of asylum. These statements recall the use of the word refugee to describe participants of the Great Migration in the mid-twentieth century and those whose homes were lost after Hurricane Katrina. 

Although the word refugee strikes Danticat as dramatic at first, she reconsiders this idea in light of a housing project she once visited in her Brooklyn neighborhood. That residence, as well as the school she attended, operated like a refugee camp by treating people as temporary. Danticat writes of her elementary school, “The message we always heard from those who were meant to protect us: that we should either die or go somewhere else.