The Fire This Time

Many of the writers in this collection meditate, interrogate, and rage against the devaluation of African Americans. Wendy S. Walters observed this in the mass graves of African slaves beneath Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which lay beneath an ordinary intersection for over two centuries. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah walked through James Baldwin’s former home in France, wondering why anyone would destroy this piece of the writer’s legacy. Many grieve the lives lost to racially motivated violence. The authors of The Fire This Time compel themselves—and their readers—to remember those whom whitewashed history would prefer to forget. 

Throughout American history, the country has dismissed, demeaned, and discriminated against its black citizens, starting from the institution of slavery and persisting until the present. As Jesmyn Ward writes in the Introduction, “we cannot talk about black lives mattering or police brutality without reckoning with the very foundation of this country. We must acknowledge the plantation, must unfold white sheets, must recall the black diaspora to understand what is happening now” (9). That foundation is what Honorée Fanonne Jeffers calls the “scatological, morally bankrupt” (67) practice of white Americans enslaving Africans. They captured Africans from their homelands, sold them as property, and denied them fundamental human rights for hundreds of years. 

The devaluation of black life did not end with the emancipation of slaves at the end of the Civil War. Wilkerson, Anderson, and others identify the legacy of slavery bearing out today upon the criminal justice system and voting legislation. These patterns persist as white Americans “devalue the lives of the slaughtered” (201), as Daniel José Older explains. Older goes on, “But if those lives matter now then they mattered then, and the clapback stretches through history, unraveling all the creation myths this country has always held most sacred, toppling our many false idols and cleaning out our profaned temples” (201). Although the difficult facts of history might shift dominant narratives of the United States, these facts must be preserved and discussed to call out injustice and pursue change. Isabel Wilkerson identifies the necessity of facing the truth as well: “we must know our history to gain strength for the days ahead” (61). 

This necessity becomes more acute when violent acts against African Americans are sidelined, silenced, or even normalized. In a defiant call to gaze at racial injustice, Mamie Till Mobley exposed her son Emmett Till’s beaten and lynched body to the public. Claudia Rankine writes of Mobley, “By placing both herself and her son’s corpse in positions of refusal relative to the etiquette of grief, she ‘disidentified’ with the tradition of the lynched figure left out in public view as a warning to the black community, thereby using the lynching tradition against itself” (148). This act resisted the public trend toward erasure of African Americans and called out Till’s racially motivated murder for what it was. Likewise, the writers of The Fire This Time repeat names like Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, and others as a call for remembrance. They identify the dignity and humanity in each person lost to racial violence, combatting the public impulse to forget and dehumanize black life.