For a New Year, Here's Some Hope...
...without optimism.
Maybe the best email I ever received was in response to my first book. The writer told me he appreciated my work, but he thought the book was missing one chapter. He told me what the missing chapter should be titled, the piece of music that should accompany it, and the general subject matter that the chapter should cover. I was thrilled with every sentence.
I think most writers hope for that kind of engagement. When we do our work well, people step into the worlds we've created and they feel connected. I heard, in the message telling me about the chapter I missed, the best kind of critic--one who has engaged deeply with the work. Popular discourse mostly uses the term 'critical' to describe someone being harsh or nitpicky. But "critically" just means carefully or thoughtfully or reflectively or seriously.
I’m almost always grateful for feedback. Folks send emails, and sometimes letters, or they wait patiently to speak at a book talk or forum. Some are kind, others are not. Some ask questions. The most common question is, "where is there hope?"
I get it. I tend to write about hard stuff. After twenty years of witnessing heartbreak after heartbreak, I am a cocktail of rage, sadness, and burnout. Even when I try to conceal it, I’m sure I sometimes sound jaded. And because I do my best to be clear-eyed about the nature of what I'm writing about--most often race and place--I'm not going to sound like a hope dealer. That doesn't mean that I'm not hopeful. But I'm not optimistic, to be sure, and I don't think confusing the two helps.1
The question of hope deserves a response. Hopelessness bears no fruit. Despair is the domain of the privileged, for whom the future is not in doubt anyway. "Hope is not a strategy" for social change, as various people have said, though I think they more precisely mean ‘optimism’ or ‘wishful thinking’ rather than ‘hope.’ Hope is action aimed at the responsibilities we owe to both our ancestors and to our descendants. For the former, we might be carrying on their work. We might be interrupting their legacies by taking it upon ourselves to correct their mistakes. For our descendants, we owe our best efforts to leave this place as unpolluted as we can. Hope is the dogged persistence that our systems might work better for us, and the ornery belief that we deserve better systems, even when there is little reason to think that we will get them. It is the gumption to create in the material world what you receive in reverie.
Where is there hope? The question might mean, “are things going to be OK?”
The answer to that question: No.
Things are not going to get better, at least not soon. I have no faith in "a benign future."2 Trust in the eventual okayness of things is optimism, not hope. Terry Eagleton points out that optimism is essentially a conservative position because it indicates relative satisfaction with the present which is to be preserved. Even if the current order is imperfect, it does not call for some kind of revolution.
In the United States, both conservatives and liberals (n.b. that the language of our political discourse around “conservative and liberal” does not neatly align with philosophical categories by the same names) tend to have the “faith in a benign future” that Eagleton speaks of. For example, political conservatives in the United States generally find that structural racism works well for them. It works so well, in fact, that they'd rather not admit that such a thing as "structural racism" exists. So, they go about banning books and manufacturing a CRT scare and so on. The clearest distillation of the American conservatives’ conviction that things are fine is Donald Trump's current campaign slogan: "Keep America Great." The slogan also hints at the one force more powerful than conservative satisfaction with the present--the sentimentalized worship of an imagined past.
For the American political liberal, the flip side of satisfaction with a future consistent with the present is the naive belief that things will naturally get better. History, in the liberals’ accounting, is a record of gradual improvement. Our systems are strong and self-correcting. Eventually, Trump will go away and the January 6 crowd will snap out of it. “The Fever is Breaking!” But progress is not inevitable. Reconstruction gave way to resurgent white supremacy. The Fusion movement was snuffed out by Jim Crow. Freedom must be vigilantly guarded. It is, in the words of Angela Davis, "a constant struggle."
Where is there hope?
The question deserves an answer.
My response: Hope is up to us. By "us," I mean those who are dissatisfied; who see that the issue is pressing; who reject both a sanitized past and a naive trust in progress; who spend their days longing for a different world; who dream dreams and see visions and give their lives to them. Those who see themselves, as Eagleton says, "here to make trouble on behalf of those who can no longer make trouble themselves, namely the dead".3 Hope is always backwards looking in that way, determined to interrupt the long "exclusions and invisibilities" that constitute, and overdetermine, our political present.4 Hope exhumes the legacies of the dead and disinherited and insists that they can live again.5
Hope lives in places of resistance. It thrives where people are "creating a new society in the shell of the old."6 Such work is necessarily participatory.
I don't think the task of writing demands leaving people with reassurance. The first and perhaps only task is to describe the world as plainly and unflinchingly as possible.7 Patiently detailing the condition of the world is itself a hopeful act. It resists both the destructive nihilism of conservatives and the weak optimism of liberals. To be unflinching is risky because the fissures run deep. The world can be overwhelming and discouraging. But it can also be different. Only by naming the bleakness and speaking into it is difference possible.
More praise for Our Trespasses: Rev. Dr. Paul Baxley is the executive coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a national network of Baptist churches. Here’s what he has to say about the book:
“Our Trespasses is a powerful and provocative witness that compels white congregations and denominational communities to think deeply and confessionally about our past while also summoning us to commit to a much different kind of future. How have our theological language and ministry practices allowed us to participate in and even benefit from urban renewal projects that have decimated Black neighborhoods and congregations? How have we been blind to our neighbors and the systems and structures that hold them in bondage? How can we now use our words, our witness, and our properties to repair the devastations of many generations while also seeking a future that is just? Just as Our Trespasses confronts us with haunted urban landscapes around us, it also offers the kind of challenge to be expected as the Holy Spirit convicts, reproves, and summons us to a life worthy of the gospel.”
What’s coming up: For the next little while, you’ll start getting two posts from me most weeks. Starting mid-January, one set of those will serialize the incredible foreword to the book by Chanequa Walker-Barnes and the first chapter. The other will be some new writing on whatever is catching my fancy.
AND, mark your calendars for a couple of events: Release Day party on February 20. Details are being finalized, but it is going to be really cool. For those out of town, we’ll have an online event around that same time. And for paid subscribers only, I’m planning an event in a spot of historical significance that will be unforgettable. Keep an eye out for details.
One Last Note: I’ve recently started reading Robin DG Kelley’s biography of Thelonious Monk. Highly recommended. Here’s a cool Monk big band track:
Terry Eagleton’s book Hope Without Optimism (New Haven: Yale UP, 2015) has stuck with me over the past few years. Eagleton, a literary theorist, is brilliant, deeply funny, and wise. The book’s epigram is from the British priest Herbert McCabe: “We are not optimists; we do not present a lovely vision of the world which everyone is expected to fall in love with. We simply have, wherever we are, some small local task to do, on the side of justice, for the poor.”
Eagleton, p. 4.
Eagleton, p. 29.
The sociologist Avery Gordon writes about the hauntings that are a “constitutive element” of modern societies. By hauntings, she does mean escapist, Hollywood ghost stories, but rather “stories of exclusions and invisibilities” by which a ghost might register unresolved social traumas. See her important work Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
A significant part of my work in Our Trespasses was to learn and narrate the stories of two such people from Charlotte, Abram North and Annie Carson North. Both were born enslaved. Following the Civil War, they were key parts of founding a church, organizing the Fusion movement in Mecklenburg County, and creating the thriving place that was the Brooklyn neighborhood of Charlotte. The book covers every detail of their lives that I could find, as well as incredible interviews with their powerful descendants, who carry their legacy today in their work and witness.
This was a favorite phrase of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin of the Catholic Worker movement. They are among the patron saints around my household.
The link there goes to a podcast episode of Primary Sources, with guest Ta-Nehisi Coates. While I was still working on the book, I probably listened to this conversation 15 or more times. I found it quite stirring, especially in moments where I was losing steam or doubting the project itself or my ability to finish it.