The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race

by Jesmyn Ward

A friend who let me borrow an issue made my introduction, but only after he spent almost twenty minutes questioning the quality of my high school education. How could I have never heard of such an influential magazine? I got rid of the friend and kept his copy.

But empathy, these days, is hard to come by. Maybe this is because everyone is having such a hard time being understood themselves.

It seems the rate of police killings now surpasses the rate of lynchings during the worst decades of the Jim Crow era.

a fellow kidnapped African

Public-sector employment, where there is less discrimination in hiring and pay, has traditionally been an important venue for creating a black middle class.

The state so fiercely neglected her education

The revolution wasn’t televised—there we saw only burning cars and concerned pundits—but it was live-tweeted.