Watching what happened in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island and knowing that blacks are 21 times more likely than whites to be shot by the police constitute a heavy psychological tax. Freedom — and more broadly speaking, basic well-being — are relative goods. I lament that Paris can be a threatening space for Jews, Roma, Africans and Arabs, but the truth is, as a black American, I’ve never felt safer or less harassed anywhere. It’s difficult to exaggerate the existential boon of shedding one’s victimhood.

Of course there is no black Zion with a head of state urging the diaspora to return. But there have been movements for mass migration before, most notably Marcus Garvey’s early 20th-century Universal Negro Improvement Association, and its quixotic mission — based on the position that America would never grant blacks a fair shake — to forge a global black economy and create settlements for Americans in Africa by transporting blacks back to Africa by ship. W.E.B. Du Bois, a global citizen who was educated at the University of Berlin and later went into exile in Ghana, argued that Garvey’s plan to “unite Negrodom by a line of steamships was a brilliant suggestion and Garvey’s only original contribution to the race problem.” Garvey’s Black Star Line collapsed in 1921. It was a business catastrophe that swallowed many families’ savings, but it remains a potent symbol of exodus.

A realistic program of black expatriation today would start with appreciating the huge potential of cheap flights and Internet hyperconnectivity. And it would be tempered by a healthy skepticism toward the idea of finding utopia anywhere. It would focus instead on the strength and adaptability of individuals and the social networks they can create by integrating into societies that allow black expats the status — still too often denied in America — of being treated first and foremost as Americans and not as blacks.

Consider my friend Gerard from Queens. As with many black Americans, European vacations weren’t part of his upbringing. Last year, he left New York for a new job in London. When I called him to compare impressions of life abroad, he confessed, “The race situation back home occupies so much space in your mind, even just safety-wise, I actually never fully understood what it meant to be American, and all the advantages that come with it, until now.” There are subtler satisfactions, too: “You immediately remove that affirmative action target from your back. A work visa gives you the validation that you’re good at what you do.”

Certainly not everyone can just pick up and go, nor is expatriation a panacea for all that afflicts black America. But at a time when middle-class blacks remain unemployed at twice the rate of whites, and black college graduates have the same chance of being hired as high school-educated whites, the economic case for staying put is not airtight.