The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race

by Jesmyn Ward

Only three of the submitted pieces explicitly referenced the future. Most of them were concerned with the past and the present. And that told me two things. First, it confirmed how inextricably interwoven the past is in the present, how heavily that past bears on the future; we cannot talk about black lives mattering or police brutality without reckoning with the very foundation of this country.

We’re tired. We’re tired of having to figure out how to talk to our kids and teach them that America sees them as less, and that she just might kill them.

We seem to be in a continuing feedback loop of repeating a past that our country has yet to address.

And we must know deep in our bones and in our hearts that if the ancestors could survive the Middle Passage, we can survive anything.

For a black man, to assert your dignity before the police was to risk assault.

African Americans and Hispanics were subject to nearly 90 percent of the 4.4 million stop-and-frisk actions despite constituting only about half of the city’s population.)

This is something that always gets me. When I hear people use the supposed excuse that "black people commit most of the crimes." Like it literally doesn't occur to them that if 90% of the people that are stopped and searched are black or brown, then obviously they'll be indicted and convicted at higher rates, not to mentioned sentenced more harshly for the same crimes. It's not that black people commit more crime, it's that lots more white people get away with it.

Justice is a door that, when closed, must be kicked in.

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

We are in America because our lives meant nothing to those in power in the countries where we came from. Yet we come here to realize that our lives also mean nothing here.