San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
LET’S TALK ABOUT RACE
CNN anchor’s book takes on American racism but lacks poignancy and urgency
In ‘This Is the Fire,’ Don Lemon focuses on American racism.
Ten days after police shot 22-year-old father Stephon Clark multiple times in Sacramento, after his cellphone was presumed to be a gun, CNN anchor Don Lemon interviewed Clark’s brother, Stevante, on his evening news program. Or rather, he attempted to interview him.
What viewers saw instead was a tense 21⁄2-minute exchange between two different worlds: Lemon’s professional, suit-and-tie composure and Clark’s T-shirt-and-bandanna grief. At the outset, when Lemon asked how he and his family were holding up, Clark fell silent and rang a bell.
Confused, Lemon asked, “What does that mean?” and Clark replied: “Next question.” Several times, Clark chattered with someone off-camera and lashed out at the media for swarming people in grief. Clark was upset when Lemon repeatedly referred to Stephon as “your brother” and demanded of the anchor: “Don Lemon: Say. His. Name.”
Lemon spontaneously and vulnerably shared that he understood what Clark was going through because he, too, recently lost a sibling. But the words got lost: Neither man was able to hear the other over the crosstalk, and Lemon ended the segment.
In his new book, “This Is the Fire: What I Say to My Friends About Racism,” Lemon writes: “I hadn’t intended to share that. I believe a journalist should bring the empathy and understanding they gain from life experiences without injecting their personal narrative into the story of the moment. But at this particular moment, I was trying to build whatever bridge I could.”
An entire book could be written about that 21⁄2-minute exchange, exploring what it means for Black people to express their grief and strive for systemic justice. But Lemon
is focused more on bridgebuilding.
In the book, Lemon seeks to not only pull back the curtain on these private moments in the his life but also connect them to America’s long-standing history of racism. He illuminates where American racism comes from, what it looks like, and where it goes from here.
In a book written over the past year during the pandemic, the unwinding of the Trump presidency and the rise of racial unrest, Lemon offers an optimistic view, writing that we may be seeing “the death throes of White supremacy in concert with the birth pangs of racial renaissance.” But, he insists, real change won’t come by watching and waiting for White supremacy to end.
“This time feels different,” he writes, “but it won’t be different unless we make it different with commitment, forbearance, and hard work.”
In a chapter called “About the Benjamins,” Lemon addresses the economic side of racism and how to combat it. He notes the power of the consumer to bring political progress. Changing demographics point to an ever larger role for people of color in the economy, and that new power must be leveraged, Lemon suggests.
“If we hope to make a tectonic shift in how this country functions on a daily household level,” he writes, “we have to take this fight back to where it began: money.” He sees hope in people of color exerting their influence in politics through the marketplace. “We need to grow an economic conscience,” Lemon explains, “and ironplate our values with the willful spending — or withholding — of cold, hard cash.” He adds that we need “single-minded consumers who think — no, really think — before they feed another dollar into the bloated belly of a White supremacist economy.”
But Lemon resists siding with those who see a need to drastically rethink how police operate in light of recent killings of unarmed Black men and women. He notes the “battle cry” of “Defund the police!” but adds: “Frankly, it made me cringe.” He believes the urgency of that catchphrase fails to recognize the process of change — which is sometimes slow.
Lemon opens the book with a letter to his nephew lamenting the way the world is and the need to fight complacency in the battle against racism. It’s an intimate, tender approach that been used with more poignancy by Black intellectuals such as Martin Luther King Jr., Ta-nehisi Coates, Imani Perry and Kiese Laymon. These writers speak specifically to Black people and deliver a mixture of honesty, tenderness and exasperation about the Black experience. They have discarded the goal of laying out an objective argument — they have no concern about the White gaze, and its acceptance, rejection or harm. By tossing away those considerations, they unearth something more honest, more pertinent, more timeless as they talk directly to the Black community.
Both the title “This Is the Fire” and Lemon’s letter seek to evoke James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” and his “Letter to My Nephew,” in which Baldwin addresses the travesty and frailty of navigating White America. Baldwin has become the iconic shorthand and barometer for Black ethos, his work and identity forming a fundamental part of our culture. Lemon’s attempt to associate his work with the brilliance of Baldwin can only come up short. “This Is the Fire” is not up to the task of extending Baldwin’s legacy or vision.
Ultimately, Lemon leaves me wondering who he’s speaking to — who his friends are in his subtitle. They seem to be mainly White people. That’s not shade, but it was something that sat with me as I read “This Is the Fire.” I wish Lemon had made friends with Stevante Clark, or someone like him, someone whose plight, closeness and lack of bull might’ve aided this book’s emotional tone.
“This Is the Fire” somehow lacks the perspective and urgency of other books on race, the sanctity of Black lives and the heel that White America seeks to keep us under. “This Is the Fire” might have felt richer, newer, more of a risk-taking effort had it addressed Lemon’s nephew throughout rather than changing course to speak to his friends. Lemon goes to great pains to make the case for Black justice, racial progress and a re-examination of where we’ve been and are going, but I couldn’t help thinking that if it takes almost 200 pages to convince my friends of this, I need new friends.
Johnson, whose first book, “Black Genius: Our Celebrations and Our Destructions,” will be released in summer 2023, wrote this for The Washington Post.