◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

The Fire This Time I have been here before. Not here exactly. Not this particular man, this particular moment, this particular cruelty performed for the cameras with such evident pleasure. But here. This place. The place where America decides, again, what it is willing to do to the people it has decided do not fully count. I have been watching America make this decision my entire life. And I am tired in a way that has no bottom — a tiredness that lives in the body, in the specific knowledge that the thing you have been warning about has arrived again wearing a new face and the people who should have known better are surprised. I am not surprised. I grew up in Harlem understanding, before I had words for it, that there were two Americas — the one that said all men are created equal and the one that decided, in practice, which men that meant. I left for Paris at twenty-four because the hatred this country required me to carry would eventually kill me. And then I came back. Because you cannot write about a country from a safe distance. Because the truth required me to be in the burning building. I came back for the children in Birmingham. I came back for Medgar and Malcolm and Martin and stood over each of their bodies in turn. The history that white Americans have not been willing to face does not disappear because they will not face it. It lives in the body politic the way trauma lives in the body — underground, unnamed, expressing itself in symptoms that seem to have nothing to do with the original wound. The original wound is this: This country was built on a crime. Not a mistake. Not a misunderstanding. A crime. The reduction of human beings to property, the theft of labor and land and life on a scale that has no parallel in the history of the republic. And the country has never done the reckoning that a crime of that magnitude requires — the full accounting, the restructuring, the repair. And so the crime lives on. In the zip codes and the school budgets and the prison populations and the gap between what this country promises and what it delivers to the people it has decided do not quite count. The man you have elected did not create this. He did not create the rage. The rage is real and old. He did not create the fear — the fear of people promised a certain place in the order of things who are watching that place become less certain, who have been told for decades that the reason their lives are harder is the people at the bottom rather than the people at the top. He found it. He named it. He pointed it. At the people with the least power to protect themselves. The immigrant. The refugee. The Black man in the street. The woman who wants sovereignty over her own body. This is not new. This is the oldest story in America. Find someone smaller. Call them the threat. Unite the frightened people against them. And while they are looking at the threat — take everything. I love this country. I know how that sounds. And I still love it the way you love something that has never lived up to what it could be — with the grief of the person who sees the possibility and cannot stop seeing it even when the reality is devastating. America is not what it has been. America is not even, fully, what it is. America is what it is still capable of becoming. That is worth fighting for. Not with sentimentality. With the truth. The truth about what this country has been, what it has cost, who has paid, and what is owed. The truth is not the enemy of America. The truth is the only thing that has ever made America worth the trouble of loving. I am still here. Still bearing witness. Still refusing to pretend that what I see is something other than what it is. See what is there. Say what you see. Do not look away. The fire is real.