The Fire This Time

Claudia Rankine’s friend had a son and immediately thought, “I have to get him out of this country” (145). She and Rankine laughed, knowing the implausibility, desperation, and pervasive fear behind this thought. The essay’s title comes from another of Rankine’s friends as she considers having a black son in America. His risk of sudden death exacerbates her mourning, a constant experience no white person can understand, since black Americans can be killed while doing ordinary activities. 

In 1963, a bomber killed four black girls at Birmingham, Alabama, church; recently, a white man killed nine people at a Charleston, South Carolina, church. He left three survivors, and although his family is grieving, theirs is not the constant grief of being African American. The terrorist’s actions did not come about spontaneously but developed over a lifetime of hearing racist language and observing similar violence. America’s history is riddled with the deaths of black people, so current events such as the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri should not surprise people. 

Emmett Till, whom white men lynched in Mississippi in 1955, was buried in his hometown of Chicago. His mother, Mamie Till Mobley, asked for an open-casket funeral and permitted people to photograph her son’s body, defying the systematic devaluation of black bodies in America.