Trudie's Reviews > The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race

I have been reading plenty of great fiction about issues of race inequality - Homegoing, The Underground Railroad, Sing, Unburied Sing, and A Kind of Freedon . Fiction is such an great portal into worlds and minds far removed from my own experience. I have learnt so much from each of these novels. But even so, some nuances will always be lacking when you don't hail from the American South or in my case America at all and it is then that I turn to non-fiction to fill in some much needed historical and contemporary perspective.

The Fire This Time is a perfect introduction to contemporary issues of race in America or at least it was for me. This slim but weighty anthology of essays filled in the gaps in my knowledge about life in America for a person of colour. I got something out of every single essay and poem.

Details of the various cases of police brutality, come up often and are almost a constant strand through this entire book. The essay with the photos of murals taken in NYC boroughs extolling you to Know Your Rights! ! to avoid getting harassed by the police brought home how serious this problem is. It is hard for me to comprehend a citizenry comprising over 42 million people who need advice about how to protect themselves from their own police force in a country that is a democracy.

Arguably one of the best essay's in the book, Black and Blue made the point that the author felt more free to walk at night in the crime-filled streets of Kingston, Jamaica, than as a black man in the streets of New York city. This is but one of several exceptionally well made points from contributors of varying backgrounds and writing styles. There are essays on Phillis Wheatley, on slave cemeteries (this one was quite disturbing), on the strange tale of Rachel Dolezal. Almost all pay some kind of tribute to James Baldwin. It is such a wide-ranging collection with many exceptional pieces of writing.

(As a side note, I was reading this at the same time as the 2018 Pulitzer prizes for journalism were awarded and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah a contributor to this collection won a Pulitzer for Feature writing with this article on the murder, of parishioners in Charlestown, an atrocity that crops up over and over again in this book. It makes a great companion read. )