Over the last year, while doing research on black millennials, I have interviewed many black people in their 20s and 30s — lawyers, hairstylists, writers, secretaries — who moved from the North to the South or were planning to do so. The reasons they gave me were variations on this theme: Black life is now the South. Racism is everywhere. And at least in Atlanta real estate is more affordable than in New York.

So, I wonder, should I go, too?

I grew up in Englewood, N.J, happily going to Baumgart’s, which serves some of the best ice cream I’ve ever tasted. My mother told me she wasn’t allowed into the cafe when she was a child. It would be surprising if I weren’t always followed in Barneys. Eric Garner was killed 30 miles from my home.

The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that New York and Pennsylvania each had more hate groups than Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi or Virginia. The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, at California State University, San Bernardino, found that more than 1,000 hate crimes were reported in nine major cities in 2016. New York City had 380 incidents, the highest nationwide.

Given all that, the way Southern transplants talk about life in a promised land of upwardly mobile black people is appealing.

Except, I sort of hate the South.

My great-aunt Dee died recently at the age of 99. Whenever I asked her why she left Manning, S.C., in the 1930s during the Great Migration of Southern blacks to Northern cities — after explaining to her what the Great Migration was and that she was in it — she said her family moved for the chance of a better life, better jobs. She would never go back, she told me. There was nothing there for her to go back to.

I visited Manning, a small city a little more than an hour southeast of Columbia, this year, and that feeling — nothing to go back to — followed me around as I tried to find relics of my great-aunt’s South. I was overwhelmed when I learned that Brown v. Board of Education had roots in a case in her county.