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

The final chapters explore the current state of race relations in the US and the country’s future. Neither topic can ignore the COVID-19 pandemic and Trump. During the pandemic, most stores installed enforced social distancing guidelines like requiring facemasks and limiting how many people can be inside. Lemon’s experience at the kitchenware store made him feel as if it selectively enforced the rules—and the alternative explanations that others offered about the encounter felt like a form of “gaslighting” and almost made him long for blunter forms of prejudice (128). He compares that experience to how, as segregation ended, towns in the South closed public swimming pools because of supposed health or privacy issues.

Using both Wilkerson’s research into caste and the 1934 movie Imitation of Life, Lemon explains the struggles of uniting poor Whites and people of color. The 1934 film and its 1959 remake depict a rare instance of intersectional collaboration in which a White widow convinces a homeless Black woman to sell her pancake recipe. The product is a runaway success, but the Black woman must become a mammy stereotype in advertising, loses her daughter after she decides to pass as a White woman, and cannot publicly join in the widow’s success. Lemon wonders whether the director intended the movie to be uplifting or condemning because the widow walks upstairs to the life of a socialite while the key to her success goes downstairs alone.

Lemon feels that it’s time to stop debating the cost of social programs that might benefit people of color and calculate just how much people of color lost over the centuries. If enslaved people earned today’s near-minimum wage of $9 per hour, they would have contributed $32,760 in labor annually. Today, people of color regularly have higher car insurance and mortgage costs as well as potential exploitation as prison labor.

The CDC did make mistakes during the first months of the COVID-19, such as its hesitancy to recommend masks for the public (Panetta, Grace. “Fauci Says He Doesn't Regret Telling Americans Not to Wear Masks at the Beginning of the Pandemic.” Business Insider, 16 July 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-doesnt-regret-advising-against-masks-early-in-pandemic-2020-7. Accessed 23 July 2021). However, it also had to deal with Trump, who dismissed the disease’s severity, contradicted CDC guidelines, and recommended disproven remedies such as hydroxychloroquine or even bleach. Whether his behavior was calculated or impulsive, the former reality TV host excelled at centering the narrative on himself.

Even Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis became a media sideshow that drowned out other stories. While news of his diagnosis spread quickly on Twitter, Lemon could not cover stories as a reporter without confirming it. Trump waited until after the networks signed off to reveal his diagnosis and later conducted a series of staged media opportunities, including proof-of-life videos, a motorcade around Walter Reed Medical Center, and a mask-less return to the White House while he was still visually struggling. He then returned to his denialist stance as if nothing happened. Comedian Jordan Klepper, who regularly interviews Trump supporters, compared the 2020 rallies to a concert where the crowd only wants to hear the often-racist “greatest hits” (178).

Lemon provides several examples of how strong emotions can enact change. Anger drove the commoners of France to storm the Bastille and overthrow the caste system. Solidarity enabled Lech Wałęsa to build a movement that shattered communist Poland and ended the Cold War. Compassion helped White South Africans recognize the brutal policing of Black citizens during apartheid and helped Catholic schools end segregation independent of the government. Vision inspired others to follow Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc, and Martin Luther King, Jr. However, Donald Trump’s uniquely American bigotry can, likewise, be a vision that lasts long after him.

Rather than pointing to a specific leader for the future, Lemon finds solace in the silent change that has already happened in his lifetime. His father helped desegregate Baton Rouge, and Lemon’s family accepted his homosexuality unconditionally. He can set an example to his and Tim’s nephews and future children about avoiding prejudice. While young activists may take for granted the increase in marketing to disadvantaged groups, interracial marriage, and the election of PoC candidates, these are examples of how previously impossible concepts are now mainstream.

Returning to James Baldwin, Lemon interprets The Fire Next Time with the understanding that racial flashpoints will continue to erupt until “Black people reject their numb complacency” and White people reject their entitled privilege (194). He hopes that the shock of 2020 will push people toward progress that heals old wounds, comparing it to how John Lewis’s civil rights march on Bloody Sunday is progress and potentially renaming the Edmund Pettus Bridge after him is healing. This crisis should be the fire that heals the country.