“A New Generation Speaks about Race” is the subtitle of this collection of essays, memoirs, poetry, etc. A number of my GR friends have reflected on the powerful nature of this material. I agree with many of their observations concerning the way, here in the USA, we have not been able to treat all as equal.There is little in this book that I can find to make me believe that things, in the near term, will be getting better. There seems little as a non-black that I can hope to change except this:I...

"My only sin is my skin, ... What did I do, to be so black and blue?"Fats Waller, "(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?""The title of this choric collection of prismatic prose and poetry convoking for equality, compassion and freedom from fear, written by some of today's prominent and talented African-American writers, derives from the title of James Baldwin's groundbreaking The Fire Next Time which he ended with the fiery memorable passage:"If we...the relatively conscious whites and the re...

“Since 2015, police officers have fatally shot at least 135 unarmed Black men and women nationwide, an NPR investigation has found.” Reported on NPR 1/25/21This collection of essays was published in 2016, written before most if not all of those deaths. The book is already full of lists of murdered people--the cover art is actual tally marks--yet since its writing, we have this unthinkable number of 135 more.“It seems the rate of police killings now surpasses the rate of lynchings during the wors...

it is hard, if not I possible, for person born white to enter the skin of a person of color, to understand how they see things. No matter how sympathetic we are to their plight, no matter how regretful, we cannot see things the way they see them, experience things the way they do. These essays let me glimpse inside, showed me a little of how things have effected them, how the past has colored their future. The color divide is a wide one, I believe, though after all this time it should not be. No...

In the Introduction to this collection of essays by an impressive roster of writers known for thoughtful and articulate discussion of their experience with race in America, Jesmyn Ward explains that she wanted something more than newspaper accounts or editorials when faced with the events of the past eighteen months in the USA. Her own book on the death of five young men of her acquaintance, Men We Reaped, meant that hearing of and seeing via public media further deaths of black men by white men...

This is perhaps the best essay collection that I have read thus far. Not that I've read a significant number of essay collections; but it's becoming an appealing genre for me. I approached this book with one thought in mind: What do young people think about race? Do they get it? Of course the title to me implies young people 30ish or so. I recently read The Fire Next Time. It was tremendously affecting in that the mood and thoughts on race back then, were strikingly similar to where we stand to...

4.5 StarsI’m very grateful for the opportunity to read this collection of essays, a topic that seems to be everywhere, in the news, as well as nonfiction and fiction books. The Fire This Time by Jesmyn Ward is timely as a topic, but it’s tragic that it needed to be written. Some of these essays are better than others, but all are worth reading. You’ll recognize the names of people you’ve read about, heard some of the details of their tragic stories. The details of areas where the high racial ten...

I read The Fire This Time with great urgency. The murders this week of two more innocent black men at the hands of cops, followed by the sniper attacks on Dallas police officers, are a kind of nightmarish call and response that demand reflection and action.It's hard to know what to do when the problems in our country seem so huge and insurmountable. I want so badly not to be part of the problem. I want to quit agonizing over my privilege and do something that matters. But what can one person do

This anthology has a stellar list of contributors, including Edwidge Danticat, Kiese Laymon, Claudia Rankine, Isabel Wilkerson, and many more. It’s fabulous. The pieces are varied, ranging from essay to memoir to poetry. They are consistently moving and powerful, each capturing a different perspective on what it means to be Black in America today. Readers will come to this book for different reasons, but it remains essential reading for everyone who cares about the American experience, past, pre...

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 historica...

Encompassing many subjects, styles, and tones, The Fire This Time aims to spark thoughtful conversation about the current state of race relations in America, as well as theorize what forms Black identity and anti-racist activism might take in an increasingly digitalized society. In spite of shared reference to recent social trends and tragedies, the essays in the collection consider a vast span of topics: the nation's cultural amnesia over slavery, white rage, walking while Black, the ethics of

The Fire This Time blew me away. It’s an odd experience to read a collection of essays that’s hard to put down – reading past my bedtime, early in the morning, and at my desk at lunch. Why? The incredibly timely subject is only part of it – the writing and the personal quality of the essays is what had me glued to this collection. Inspired by James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, the editor has collected a series of personal essays and poems written by African Americans about race in the US today....

Read this one slowly over the course of the month and man, it was good. Like any anthology, some essays are significantly stronger than others. But when those essays hit, they HIT.A lot of them are ones that have been expanded out into other books (White Rage by Carol Anderson, Blacker Than Thou by Kevin Young) or published elsewhere (Da Art of Storytellin' by Kiese Laymon) or ones that feel familiar if you regularly read the writer (The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning by Claudia Rank...

Powerful, powerful, powerful!!!This incredibly moving collection of essays speaks to topics such as race, human rights, family, identity and the Black experience in America, both historical and present-day. Easily, one of the best collections of this type that I have ever read; each author/artist/thinker wrote with such strength, conviction and grace. I could not put this down once I started.Each of these essays/stories/poems are thought-provoking, heart-felt, captivating, well-written, distinct...

While I loved some of these essays, very many did not work for me all that much. I know I am not the target audience for this, so please do take my rating with a grain of salt. For one thing, I am not American and I do think that quite a bit of the cultural context will have flown over my head, for another thing, I am also not a person of colour. I can appreciate how important this collection of essays is without being blown away myself. I found the vast majority of these essays well-written eno...

The Fire This Time. Police brutality and systemic racism are plaguing the United States as if we hadn't gone through the Civil Rights movement. I living in France, a country without worry or anxiety when I go out, don't have to face so much overt racism, nor too many microagressions, sit and listen to the countless horrific cases of police brutality ending in fatality. I am almost fifty years old and am proud to have seen a black president and hopefully a female one. However the hate crimes, pol...

As an homage to James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, acclaimed author Jesmyn Ward collected writings from nearly two dozen preeminent thinkers, writers, and artists to reexamine race in America over 50 years after the publication of Baldwin's seminal text. This book was published in 2016, not long after the killing of Michael Brown and the Charleston church shooting. Unfortunately, since then there have been many other racially motivated acts of violence in the U.S. that have kept much, if not a...

I started this book today intending to read one or two essays. I found I couldn't put it down, even when the cumulative pain and rage expressed made me want to. Every essay is outstanding. I was particularly struck by Edwidge Danticat's description of Haitian refugees from the Dominican Republic and comparing it to African-American "refugees" in the United States. But also an essay that describes the perils of walking while black. Another that deals with the loneliness of being black in America....

4.5 stars to 5. I inhaled this collection of essays. This book was a response to a series of killings of African Americans over the last few years, and to the book The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin.The collection contains essays and some poems. The writing styles of each piece are different, and though many of the works cover similar incidents, each author brings something a little different to the discussion. Once I started reading this collection, I could not stop. I found the essays were po...

4.5 stars. TRUE STORY : I had so many articulated thoughts (I swear, humor me) to explain why I loved this collection of essays and why I thought it was very important to read it - of course if you're Afro-American but also if you are not. I'll forever advocate for books who make me feel uncomfortable because of my own privileged biases - even if I'm not American. I had all these articulated sentences ready to burst on the page, talking about how I will never truly know what it is to be blac