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

Author:Don Lemon [LEMON, DON]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2021-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

More than 150 years after the official end of the Civil War, the United States is engaged in what many people call the uncivil war, an unceasing pitched battle over the same old issue: White supremacy. Now, as then, the trenches are dug by goaded fears, learned hatred, loaded rhetoric, and bare-knuckled politics. The foot soldiers—desperately angry on one side, desperately ignorant on the other—are the distant children of obsolete martyrs and forgotten foes. It’s no longer a war between North and South, and it never was a war between Black and White; it is an ideological conflict between those who cling to a barbaric ethnic caste system and those who are determined to progress beyond it.

Greed has always been and will always be the soul of this struggle. Its architects are oligarchs who raise up generals without decency and lieutenants for whom decency is a minor inconvenience. As in every war, the first and last blood spilled is the thinnest: slum scions without pedigree, poets without a dime, scholars clinging to their threadbare standards, and a World War Z horde of marching bereaved and walking wounded. Those on the front lines have no motivation but the stories they’ve been told: myths and legends presented in middle school textbooks that should be subtitled “A Redacted History of the United States” or maybe “A Conveniently Selective Memory of What Went Down.”

Faced with the challenge of reuniting South Africa after apartheid, Nelson Mandela created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as part of the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act in 1995. Under this umbrella, a Human Rights Committee conducted nationally televised hearings allowing those who’d suffered human rights abuses to be heard, ensuring that recorded history would reflect what actually happened to Black people under apartheid. An Amnesty Committee considered petitions for pardon so that some of those—not all—who’d committed human rights abuses could be forgiven, ensuring that White people would be able to embrace a post-apartheid society without fear. A Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee worked on finding ways to restore dignity and, in some cases, property. Knowing that justice in its narrowest “eye for an eye” definition was not possible, Mandela focused on cultivating Black forgiveness and White empathy as a way forward. Results achieved by the TRC are still being debated, but it was an indisputably powerful first step away from civil war and stands as a revolutionary act of covenant and absolution.

Empathy is key to the kind of social evolution we can and should strive for in this moment, and if we’re going to change the American capacity for empathy, we must question storytelling that adheres to the old caste system of heroes and villains. We must challenge iconography based on tropes of conscious and subconscious White supremacy. These tropes are inherited, embedded in family lore and religious mythology, written so deep in our bones we don’t even flinch when we see them play out. So those tropes need to be called out. It doesn’t matter if the storyteller’s intention was malevolent or benign, blatant or subtle.

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