Bell wroted in one of his essay collections.
It was titled something like Redemption Deferred: The Space Traders (taken from Langston Hughes' A Dream Deferred)
Found a photocopy version. Use to be on archive.org in its entirety.
Thank you. I read the story. To be quite frank, I can see it shaking out the way the story surmised. Fluctuating between a desire to return home to the family that was able to escape and remain, and going on to the new world that was unknown but claimed to be free of inequity. The 70% wanting to go, then 70% wanting to return later, aligns well with how mercurial emotions are — something the aliens admit they do not have and do not understand.
Also, if you pay close attention to what the aliens stated for their reason for wanting Black Americans, they essentially wanted us to be their soul. They promised to treat our people equally, but who knows if that is the truth. The statement that their extremely more advanced state, technologically speaking, and their lack of human emotions would probably make that an impossibility. I can see living in their society working, if they had first aided us in rising to their tech level on Earth. Given us our own country to do that, and then perhaps later, as all of the other nations looked on us with jealousy and a desire to attack, asked us if we were ready to leave the cesspool of Earth.
You can't just immediately uplift a people and expect them to thrive. Upliftment is a process, and it is better done in a familiar environment, Earth, instead of some absolutely unfamiliar one surrounded by a society that does not understand us, and that we do not understand in return. A few generations of preparation before introduction, though, would do the trick, in my opinion.
This is all just me surmising a better path forward in a thought-provoking science fiction story.
