Many of the writers in this collection meditate, interrogate, and rage against the devaluation of African Americans. Wendy S. Walters observed this in the mass graves of African slaves beneath Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which lay beneath an ordinary intersection for over two centuries. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah walked through James Baldwin’s former home in France, wondering why anyone would destroy this piece of the writer’s legacy. Many grieve the lives lost to racially motivated violence. The authors of The Fire This Time compel themselves—and their readers—to remember those whom whitewashed history would prefer to forget. 

Throughout American history, the country has dismissed, demeaned, and discriminated against its black citizens, starting from the institution of slavery and persisting until the present. As Jesmyn Ward writes in the Introduction, “we cannot talk about black lives mattering or police brutality without reckoning with the very foundation of this country. We must acknowledge the plantation, must unfold white sheets, must recall the black diaspora to understand what is happening now” (9). That foundation is what Honorée Fanonne Jeffers calls the “scatological, morally bankrupt” (67) practice of white Americans enslaving Africans. They captured Africans from their homelands, sold them as property, and denied them fundamental human rights for hundreds of years.