The Fire This Time

Claudia Rankine’s friend had a son and immediately thought, “I have to get him out of this country” (145). She and Rankine laughed, knowing the implausibility, desperation, and pervasive fear behind this thought. The essay’s title comes from another of Rankine’s friends as she considers having a black son in America. His risk of sudden death exacerbates her mourning, a constant experience no white person can understand, since black Americans can be killed while doing ordinary activities. 

In 1963, a bomber killed four black girls at Birmingham, Alabama, church; recently, a white man killed nine people at a Charleston, South Carolina, church. He left three survivors, and although his family is grieving, theirs is not the constant grief of being African American. The terrorist’s actions did not come about spontaneously but developed over a lifetime of hearing racist language and observing similar violence. America’s history is riddled with the deaths of black people, so current events such as the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri should not surprise people. 

Emmett Till, whom white men lynched in Mississippi in 1955, was buried in his hometown of Chicago. His mother, Mamie Till Mobley, asked for an open-casket funeral and permitted people to photograph her son’s body, defying the systematic devaluation of black bodies in America. She thought the country shared her grief, an idea that brought deaths like that of her son into the public consciousness and helped inspire the Civil Rights Movement. 

The public did not see the photographs of the bodies after the Charleston shooting, rendering them “into an abstraction” (148). After officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, his body remained on the street for four hours. This incorporated grief into the story of his death.

Rankine continues, “Black Lives Matter, the movement founded by the activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, began with the premise that the incommensurable experience of systemic racism creates an unequal playing field” (149). American society mistrusts and devalues African Americans in many ways that began with this country’s founding and persists today in both public and private. 

The phrase “All Lives Matter,” created by a white academic, reframed the Black Lives Matter movement by reintroducing whiteness and neglecting the inordinate violence against black Americans. Racism infuses every aspect of American life, from personal relationships to public policy, and creates constant fear and mourning for African Americans as they live day-to-day. This mourning informs Black Lives Matter, which memorializes slain African Americans and calls for the public to remember them as well. 

The institutional, historical devaluation and death of African Americans, which began with slavery, necessitates the constant reminder that Black Lives Matter. Progress requires that the public, particularly white Americans, acknowledge this before the culture improves. Rankine asks how to consider the dead when they also matter to their loved ones. 

The police barred Lesley McSpadden, Michael Brown’s mother, from her son’s body the day of his death, and witnesses showed her their recording of his death. McSpadden resisted publicizing his image and railed against those who sold t-shirts bearing his name. Ferguson residents similarly resisted the public attention around Brown’s death.

Tamir Rice’s mother also distanced herself from the public spectacle around her son’s death by police, an event that was filmed and widely seen. The police retained Rice’s body for six months, and the officer who shot the boy was not indicted. Deaths of African Americans by police, for which officers are often not penalized, need to be remembered and grieved in public. Writer Toni Morrison says when the criminal justice system treats white men the same way they treat black men, it will mark the end of an era. Rankine agrees but reminds readers of the invisible changes required of each American to transform the culture.  

Any black American can be killed at any time on any day, which is not true for white Americans; they cannot repress this incontrovertible fact. Public remembrance of and grief for black lives might create positive change. Rankine names each of the nine people killed at the Charleston church shooting. Her friend expresses fear for her son as a black male in America. This pervasive tension presides over African American life. White Americans might devalue the Black Lives Matter movement, or they might recognize it as a call to compassion and unity.