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

This Is the Fire draws inspiration from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, a work from the early Civil Rights moment of the 1950s and 60s, and focuses on a question about racial equality that dates to the arrival of the first enslaved Africans: “How does this end?” (192). Solving this problem demands candor and communication.

The roots of social unrest lie in unresolved problems from the past. The Europeans ripped what would become the US from Indigenous peoples and then enslaved Africans for economic reasons: to create a labor underclass, not much different from India’s caste system. Local militias put down rebellions like the German Coast Uprising with shocking brutality. While some White Americans fought against this, business and political interests overpowered them. After the Civil War, these forces maintained a system of White supremacy. Slave patrols and militias became police departments and the prison system. Redlining and segregation forced Black Americans into poorer neighborhoods. Mob violence, such as the destruction of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street, and covert undermining, like the CIA’s introduction of cheap cocaine into inner cities, often derail organic growth in these neighborhoods. The desire to remain socially above people of color often leads poor Whites to ally with the upper classes even when doing so goes against their interests.