People keep saying, “This time feels different,” and it does. It feels momentous -- nothing less than the death throes of White supremacy in concert with the birth pangs of a racial renaissance. Emotion is sweeping us forward, and I’m tremendously hopeful about our ability to harness this transformative energy. But public passion is a tide that ebbs and flows like the waves on Sag Harbor Bay, ever-changing, ever-changeless. Right now, social media has its hackles up, but that’s a shallow hackle, lasting only a little longer than the flash-bang weapons hurled at the protesters. Those who seek to divide us, for fun and profit, are good at goosing outrage and then watering down the collective urge to actively do something.
Don Lemon, if you don’t know, is an anchor on CNN, and he’s writing here about the facts and the mood in the country during the protests following the death of George Floyd. And among the things that leap of off the page at me, both here and throughout, is how good a writer Lemon actually is. Put aside the intent and the meaning behind Lemon’s words -- one of the facts that remains is that his prose is a pleasure to read.
That’s one thing. Here’s another.
This Is the Fire, as Lemon explains, is a title in reference to James Baldwin’s 1963 book, The Fire Next Time, published…
As JFK was preparing to meet his destiny in Dallas, and Martin Luther King Jr. was praying for sleep on a fetid bunk in Birmingham City Jail. I wasn’t born when Baldwin’s book was written, and Baldwin was dead by the time I read it, so it was shocking how well he knew me. My first shopworn copy from the 1980s is still on my bookshelf. The margins are scrawled with mind-blown notes. Vehement underlining scores almost every page. The book itself is slender and elegant: 144 pages of vibrant storytelling, erudite commentary, dry wit, and uncanny vision. It begins with a sweetly gut-wrenching letter to his nephew and ends with a caveat that rings in my ears today, chilling and prescient. “If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time.”
This is the fire. We’re in it. JFK and Obama led us to the rainbow; Trump forced us into the fire. And then he poured gasoline on it.
And this is more or less Lemon’s point. When it comes to America’s difficult racial history, 2017-2020 can be viewed as a kind of crucible -- and it is our actions now that will determine if what it burns away are the impurities of systemic racism or, fearfully, the melting pot-alloy of a truly diverse democracy that has been slowly building over the last fifty years.
Lemon’s book, like Baldwin’s, is a slender volume, which begins with a letter to his nephew, and which ends with a similar caveat.
The Old Testament prophet Malachi spoke of a refining fire, a furnace of affliction that purifies the soul like silver and gold. Such is the flame that burns within us now, reducing convention and injustice to ash, lighting our way forward to a new way of being.
We are the inferno in which Baldwin placed his faith. This is the fire.
Let the last next time be now.
That’s a second thing. Here’s a third.
Throughout the book, Lemon doesn’t pull any punches when diagnosing the problem facing us.
White brothers and sisters: Pocket that ‘But I’m Not a Racist!’ card. I don’t want to hear about your Black girlfriend in college, or your Black postman to whom you give fruitcake every Christmas, or that Black comp and lit teacher who totally, like, rocked your world. It doesn’t matter if you are racist or not racist or anti-racist; our society is racist. You’re just letting me know how okay you are with that. If you’re still in denial about it, then clearly you’re comfortable with the way things are, and when you tell me you’re not a racist, you’re really telling me, “Please, stop talking about racism. Your oppression is harshing my mellow.”
It is systemic racism. Lemon is unapologetic about its identification, and his focus is less on blaming people for its creation and much more on chastising those with an on-going inability to see and acknowledge it.
When my mom was growing up in Louisiana, Black families, who paid the same taxes as everyone else, were not allowed in the community center. When integration became the law of the land, city authorities opted to fill the municipal swimming pool with concrete. This was a common occurrence in towns across the United States, not just in the South. White voters went along with it, swayed by fatuous caveats about communicable disease and soft-core tales of priapic Black boys eyeing White girls in varying states of dishabille. Given the choice between spending their tax dollars on an integrated swimming pool or a sunbaked bucket of dry concrete, they chose to swelter through the long summers with no pool at all.
These are the stories -- the lived experiences -- of people who have experienced oppression, and whose oppression is erased from the awareness of their fellow citizens, erased until it is they, the oppressed, who seem to be the complainers, the people who want something more than everyone else seems to be satisfied with.
A lot of it rang true for me, seeing these experiences through another set of eyes, and understanding other motivations that were obviously at work. And here, for me, was the most telling example of them all.
Isabel Wilkerson’s groundbreaking book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents lays bare the deeply etched infrastructure of America’s caste system as surely as an X-ray held up to the light. Isabel had already won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism and a National Book Critics Circle Award for The Warmth of Other Suns, a book about the Great Migration, that watershed era during which six million African Americans moved north to escape Jim Crow laws in the post-Reconstruction South.
Wait. Full stop right there. To my recollection, I had never before heard the reason behind the Great Migration was the attempt to escape Jim Crow. “Economic opportunity,” is what I always heard. With the rise of the industrial North, millions of African Americans languishing in a dying agricultural economy came North looking for better pay, better work, and better lives. It had only ever been taught to me in economic terms, in terms, I realize now, steeped in the capitalist mythology of American greatness.
But here is another -- and frankly more plausible -- idea. The African Americans left the South in order to escape the racial segregation, discrimination, and violence of Jim Crow. Well, duh. Of course they did.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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