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

by Don Lemon

The weeping passes, and rage takes hold. The rage burns out, and blame begins. The blame bounces back and forth, and promises are made. The promises wither, and complacency returns. And the complacency stays.

so lurid and the circumstances so irrefutably egregious, it unleashed a riptide of grief and rage, exhumed the restless bones of massacred innocents in Tulsa and Rosewood, immolated the myth of desegregation, and dragged the untaught history of the United States out of the root cellar.

What happened at Rosewood?

This is the fire. We’re in it. JFK and Obama led us to the rainbow; Trump forced us into the fire. And then he poured gasoline on it.

“This is a terrible moment to have a terrible president.” I’ll be the contrarian here. It breaks my heart and burns my tongue to say it, but in 2016, Donald Trump was exactly the president we deserved and probably the president we needed in the way you need symptoms that alert you to a disease. Racism

No progress has ever been made in the timorous pursuit of getting back to normal or pleasing all of the people all of the time.

Louisiana sticks to you.

The German Coast Uprising

White supremacists—active and passive, present and past—would like to pretend their credo is “Give me liberty or give me death,” when in fact their abiding doctrine is “Give me what I want or I’ll kill you.”

As a kid, I felt trapped in what I call the “Black box”: a finite parameter of low expectations imposed on Black children, on Black potential, on Black possibility—on Black life.

That little song you hear played by an ice cream truck—you know, the one that kinda sounds like “Turkey in the Straw”—yeah, that song is actually called “Nigger Love a Watermelon

Some people claim the song is actually based on the "Turkey in the Straw" rather than the latter.

it’s harder to push back against microaggressions and small acts of discrimination that tumble by in a babbling brook of subconscious influences.

a reminder of how comfortably good and evil are able to coexist in the minds of piously complicit bystanders.

The economic imperative of our purpose must be equal and opposite to the economic imperative of their purpose.

It was customary in Victorian times to spread straw on the street in front of a home of a grieving family to muffle the sound of horses and carriages passing by.

The price we pay for the comfort of denial is the depersonalization of death and the death of empathy itself, particularly when it comes to the killing of Black people.

I question the true purpose and effect of people watching those videos over and over and over again. At what point does desensitization kick in?

but please, tell me, my White brothers and sisters, at what point will your White conscience cease to require lurid images of Black suffering?

Objectification is objectification; it doesn’t matter if you’re casting a person as saint or sinner.

Kübler-Ross model,

Does not seem to have an actual basis on Science

Boston Police Department in 1838. In 1854, the Philadelphia Police Department was founded with strict advertised rules: No immigrants.

Join the club. I mean, we’ve been targeted for hundreds of years. You know? We’ve been uncomfortable.

But I also think that there are people like me and my family members whose complicity in White supremacy is partly due to ignorance. And to some extent that ignorance is willful.

“I cannot be blamed for an ignorance which an entire republic had deliberately inculcated.”

But Lena Horne was not the role model who fit the White supremacist narrative, so we got Aunt Jemima and Uncle Remus instead.

These onscreen portrayals shape expectations, reinforce stereotypes, and validate racist tropes that translate to real-life prejudices in the workplace, on the playground, and in encounters with law enforcement and the court system.

When people at the margins create their own images, stories breathe differently. They inhale validation and exhale authenticity.

The interstitial influence of story on societal development is writ large in a movie like The Birth of a Nation

they would have to accept that they are, in fact, the ones seeking to erase history, continuing a largely successful disinformation campaign that predates the Civil War and Reconstruction.

“A dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. It’s the honest ones you have to watch out for, because you can never predict when they’re going to do something incredibly stupid.”

By Captain Jack Sparrow

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

To read

A White supremacist police force drove them into the woods along with neighbors, family members, and local business owners, then methodically hunted them down and slaughtered 60 to 150 people before installing their own White supremacist candidates in place of duly elected representatives.

North Carolina, 1898

The blessing and curse of the American Experience is that, ultimately, none of us will get what we deserve.

Trump’s campaign of uniquely American racism, uniquely American greed, and the counterfeit virtue of self-importance will continue to embolden White supremacy in the United States for decades to come.

There’s work to be done in the Black community, particularly among Evangelical Christians, who treat LGBTQ brothers and sisters with the same vitriol and discrimination they themselves are complaining about.

“I think I’m one of the ones,” said Obama.