A review by lesserjoke
The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race by Jesmyn Ward

4.0

Not every entry in this collection of essays and poems quite lands for me, but all told it's a powerful reflection from various African American writers near the start of the Black Lives Matter movement and just before the 2016 election -- when the white backlash to Obama's presidency was already gathering force but had not yet reached its peak or been widely recognized as the surge of racist resentment that it now so clearly is. Although I would hope this sort of perspective has become more widespread over the past five years, the contributors provide a valuable look at the daily difficulties of police harassment and what it's like for a contemporary black person, theoretically long after Jim Crow, to regularly witness the modern lynchings of young men like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. Writing both for people with no idea of that experience and for those who may struggle to put it into words, editor Jesmyn Ward and the rest are less in direct conversation with James Baldwin's famous 20th-century piece than one might expect from the similar title, but still offer their own substantive meditations on race in America today.

[Content warning for slurs.]

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