This Is the Fire: What I Say to My Friends About Racism

This chapter discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a higher death count in the US than in other nations, including some developing countries, because of resistance to Centers for Disease Control guidelines, which were themselves inconsistent due to a need to appease Trump. The pandemic, combined with racial unrest, resulted in unease throughout the nation.

Lemon describes an encounter in which he was shopping for cutting boards, and a store employee followed and chided him—but not a White woman—about how COVID-19 protocols restricted shopping at the store. This experience left him feeling that the employee enforced the guidelines on him only because of his race. He later returned the cutting boards. However, perhaps a more troubling aspect of this uncomfortable encounter was his White friends’ dismissing his concerns as oversensitive. Their efforts to offer other explanations felt like “gaslighting” (128). He reflects on the frequency of such interactions and how they keep him on edge.

Despite their shared struggles, lower-income White families rarely sought solidarity with their Black neighbors, and some were content with the White Trash insult if they socially remained above people of color. Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents examines class systems in India, Nazi Germany, and the US.