the Americas. What makes this current historical moment unique in the historical echo chamber of anti-Black violence is the way that smartphone technology has allowed incidents of deadly force against unarmed citizens to be documented and shared in real time, creating a transparent public record of the injustice.

Beyond the undeniable permanent record made of the event, social media has given the bereft, aggrieved, and outraged not only a platform to share their concerns and demands but a capacity to organize like-minded individuals into a large, vocal community committed to recognition for the victims of state violence and holding those in power accountable. This is the aspect that is truly unprecedented, and so nationwide coalitions of those who said, as Baldwin did, “This far, and no further” accrued potency through a skillful social media campaign and a relentless public presence, emerging as today’s social justice juggernaut in the form of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Emily Raboteau’s essay “Know Your Rights!” discusses the potential of the urban pedestrian’s cellphone in neighborhoods oppressed by crime and overpolicing as a means for holding the authorities accountable, and this example of empowerment serves as a modern counterweight to the enormous influence of the traditionally biased private media on public information and perceptions. America’s historical vilification of Black men and dehumanization of all African Americans was democratized through the most popular forms of media in news and entertainment, which calcified over time into the bedrock of American institutions and popular culture. The racist slant to coverage of the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown killings is a late-stage example of both the endurance in the media of the common depiction of Black people as “menace” or threat and the power of the news media to dictate the official narrative of events, usually serving the interests of the state. In that sense, the metaphoric purpose of “reclaiming” rightful places, identities, and possessions that is so prevalent throughout the collection extends to the social and political capital long denied African Americans by the traditional gatekeepers of mainstream American culture.

The world of Black social media that many of the writers here belong to has used its ability to amplify and unite the voices and bodies of the historically silenced, maligned, and ignored in creating a force for reform and reconciliation whose lasting influence on progressive politics is increasing, boding optimistically for the prospect of real change. This is the unstoppable might that Baldwin envisioned “shaking the dungeon,” the purifying fire out of which America will remake itself in accordance with its own mythic values. All of the writers included in the collection are witnesses to this historical moment, which—while sorrowful and infuriating—also represents a threshold of previously unrealized possibility for the equal recognition of the value of Black humanity, equal empathy for Black suffering, and equal respect for the rights of Black Americans.

In her introduction, Jesmyn Ward describes how the idea for this book was inspired by her rereading James Baldwin’s 1963 essays published as The Fire Next Time—an inspiration extending to the collection’s title, which riffs on Baldwin’s. Baldwin’s reference comes from an old Black gospel song about the Old Testament story of the flood and how Noah was rescued by God’s showing him a rainbow that led the way to dry land. According to the song, the next time God decides to punish mankind and destroy the world, it won’t be with water, but with fire.

For Baldwin, this destructive fire was also a cleansing force necessary to purify and purge the world of its corruption and wickedness, such as the kind embodied in the persistence of American anti-Black racism. Baldwin knew, and was proven correct with widespread urban riots in the following years, that unless America honestly confronted its white supremacist origins and reconciled its hypocrisy with its founding principles and cherished beliefs, then the country would be torn apart. While Martin Luther King Jr. was preaching nonviolent resistance as a means to social justice, Baldwin was convinced that America was a “house on fire” that couldn’t be saved without bloodshed. Growing up in Harlem, New York, Baldwin experienced race-based harassment and aggression from the police, and he was intimately aware of the deep-rooted white anxiety and antipathy toward black manhood, especially around issues of sexuality and masculinity.

More than fifty years later, these same themes are of urgent contemporary relevance, and in this collection, their implications are surveyed and mined by a wide range of minds and voices reflecting an American critical consciousness that Baldwin helped define. Many of these pieces were written in direct response to the bloody, turbulent summer of 2014, and others to similar injustice the following year. The Fire This Time is unified in its witness to the “fire” that Baldwin predicted, made manifest in the public reaction to the violent excess and lack of accountability on the part of the police and public authorities.

Another important Baldwin influence on this work as a whole, as well as on its individual contributors, is a formal one, the structuring of the essay as a letter to a loved one. Much like Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, published at the same time these essays were written, there is a deeply searching confessional tone to most of the works that admits pain, despair, confusion, rage, and also the hope that always brims in the promise of new generations. As Baldwin’s archetypal letter is addressed to his namesake nephew as he enters adulthood in a society that largely fears and detests him, Coates’s memoir to his teenage son popularized in American culture the concept of “The Talk,” the inevitable discussion in which Black parents pass on wisdom to their children about the commonplace nature of racism and the best methods to safely navigate its arbitrary threats while maintaining one’s dignity and claiming one’s rights. Some of the works, like Ward’s, Older’s, and Danticat’s, are specifically written as messages to their children and future children, and others, like Raboteau’s and Cadogan’s, reference the idea of “The Talk” directly, but all convey the same spirit of loving benediction for individual Black lives and the larger community of Black humanity.

The events to which the authors in the collection are responding are by no means unprecedented and are in fact, as many of the writers here demonstrate, a defining feature of American social and cultural history that can be traced back to the earliest European settlements in the Americas. What makes this current historical moment unique in the historical echo chamber of anti-Black violence is the way that smartphone technology has allowed incidents of deadly force against unarmed citizens to be documented and shared in real time, creating a transparent public record of the injustice.

Beyond the undeniable permanent record made of the event, social media has given the bereft, aggrieved, and outraged not only a platform to share their concerns and demands but a capacity to organize like-minded individuals into a large, vocal community committed to recognition for the victims of state violence and holding those in power accountable. This is the aspect that is truly unprecedented, and so nationwide coalitions of those who said, as Baldwin did, “This far, and no further” accrued potency through a skillful social media campaign and a relentless public presence, emerging as today’s social justice juggernaut in the form of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Emily Raboteau’s essay “Know Your Rights!” discusses the potential of the urban pedestrian’s cellphone in neighborhoods oppressed by crime and overpolicing as a means for holding the authorities accountable, and this example of empowerment serves as a modern counterweight to the enormous influence of the traditionally biased private media on public information and perceptions. America’s historical vilification of Black men and dehumanization of all African Americans was democratized through the most popular forms of media in news and entertainment, which calcified over time into the bedrock of American institutions and popular culture. The racist slant to coverage of the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown killings is a late-stage example of both the endurance in the media of the common depiction of Black people as “menace” or threat and the power of the news media to dictate the official narrative of events, usually serving the interests of the state. In that sense, the metaphoric purpose of “reclaiming” rightful places, identities, and possessions that is so prevalent throughout the collection extends to the social and political capital long denied African Americans by the traditional gatekeepers of mainstream American culture.

The world of Black social media that many of the writers here belong to has used its ability to amplify and unite the voices and bodies of the historically silenced, maligned, and ignored in creating a force for reform and reconciliation whose lasting influence on progressive politics is increasing, boding optimistically for the prospect of real change. This is the unstoppable might that Baldwin envisioned “shaking the dungeon,” the purifying fire out of which America will remake itself in accordance with its own mythic values. All of the writers included in the collection are witnesses to this historical moment, which—while sorrowful and infuriating—also represents a threshold of previously unrealized possibility for the equal recognition of the value of Black humanity, equal empathy for Black suffering, and equal respect for the rights of Black Americans.