Fire at The Door: The Reckoning America Keeps Avoiding

The Bill is Due. A personal reflection on James Baldwin’s warning, the illusion of progress, and what it means to be a daughter of a nation still dodging its own reckoning.

Every nation has a reckoning.
Ours is just late to answer the door.

For years, we've been living on borrowed time. Piling up sins like unpaid bills, hoping history wouldn’t notice, praying the cries of the broken wouldn’t echo forever.

But the past has a memory.
And the fire Baldwin warned us about?
It never left.

It’s been waiting for us to open up and pay what it owes.

What has changed in 62 years?

Well, there was the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The internet.
Smartphones.
The election of the first Black President, Barack Obama—among other things. AI.
Oh, and a plague called COVID-19.

Yet nothing has really changed.

James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time was an uncomfortable read. All 106 pages of it.

Why? Because it felt like a foreshadowing. A premonition, one might say.
But no, it was his reality.

Every page read like the raw thoughts we wish we could say out loud in conversation, but don’t. Because of cancel culture. Because of the risk of being labeled. Because truth is dangerous when people aren’t ready to hear it.

In 1962, Baldwin was writing in the middle of a country on edge. Our nation was boiling over with tension it didn’t want to name. The Civil Rights Movement wasn’t just headlines; it was people bleeding in the streets for basic human rights.

Black Americans were fighting to vote, to go to school safely, to simply live without fear. And America? America was dragging its feet the whole way.

John F. Kennedy (who was the President at the time), said the right things, but he didn’t act fast enough. The federal government talked about “freedom” but wouldn’t intervene until things got too bloody to ignore.

And the South?
The South clung to the old order with both hands and clenched teeth, blocking integration, threatening lives, resisting change.

It wasn’t just about laws. It was about fear.
White Americans feared losing control.
Black Americans feared for their lives.

And now, in 2025—how different are we, really?

I’ll wait.

Not very different at all.

We’ve simply expanded the list of who gets villainized. We went from demonizing Black Americans to demonizing immigrants too—treating people as threats in a land built by them.

How do you villainize an immigrant in a nation of immigrants?

We live in an era where websites like Ancestry.com thrive because we’re desperate to understand where we come from. Deep down, we know we are not truly from here. But somehow, some people have convinced themselves they’ve been chosen by God. Uniquely entitled to this land.

But all people are God’s people. The chosen people were before Jesus came and died for all of us.
The rest of us? We’re regular. We’re dust. We’re loved the same.

We call ourselves the land of the free, yet we have all been shackled for 250 years. Because the day they brought enslaved Africans here was the day White America tied their fate to ours.

We love to quote, “None of us are free until all of us are.”
But America has never truly digested it.
Call it immaturity because sure, we’re a young country. But we can’t call it ignorance.

It’s willful.
It’s avoidance.
It’s an unwillingness to sit in discomfort, to name the systems we built, to admit the root rot.

As Baldwin said,

“To accept one’s history is not the same as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.” - James Baldwin

But we haven’t accepted it. So we’re still drowning.

And though I know I stand on the right side of history, it still sucks because I feel the burn too.

You might wonder why I keep saying “we” when I didn’t build the system.
Why I claim a nation that doesn’t always claim me. One that refuses to make meaningful changes to its constitution and institution that knowingly excludes me for so long.

Call it unrequited love. Something Black Americans are all too familiar with.
Something Latino Americans are too familiar with.
It sucks to love a land that has never loved you back. But I’ll keep loving it anyways.

Because our history, my history, is American history.
I am this nation’s daughter, even if it doesn’t claim me.

“A bill is coming in that America is not prepared to pay.” — James Baldwin

Hey Uncle Sam, someone is at the door.