Prisoners of Hope

This essay appeared in "The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear," edited by Paul Rogat Loeb.

"He who has never despaired has no need to have lived." -Goethe

A specter of despair haunts late 20th-century America. The quality of our lives and the integrity of our souls are in jeopardy. Wealth inequality and class polarization are escalating – with ugly consequences for the most vulnerable among us. The lethal power of global corporate elites and national managerial bosses is at an all-time high. Spiritual malnutrition and existential emptiness are rampant. The precious systems of caring and nurturing are eroding. Market moralities and mentalities – fueled by economic imperatives to make a profit at nearly any cost – yield unprecedented levels of loneliness, isolation, and sadness. And our public life lies in shambles, shot through with icy cynicism and paralyzing pessimism.

This bleak portrait is accentuated in black America. The fragile black middle class fights a white backlash. The devastated black working class fears further underemployment or unemployment. And the besieged black poor struggle to survive. Over 30 years after the cowardly murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., black America sits on the brink of collective disaster. Yet most of our fellow citizens deny this black despair, downplay this black rage and blind themselves to the omens in our midst. So now, as in the past, we prisoners of hope in desperate times must try to speak our fallible truths, expose the vicious lies and bear our imperfect witness.

In 1946, when the great Eugene O'Neill's play The Iceman Cometh was produced, he said America was the greatest example of a country that exemplifies the Biblical question, "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world but lose his own soul?" Artists like Harry Belafonte and Coltrane and Toni Morrison and others have been asking the same question, as the young people say, "How do we keep it real?" When we look closely at jazz, or the blues, for example, we see a profound sense of the tragic linked to human agency. This music does not wallow in a cynicism or a paralyzing pessimism, but it also is realistic enough not to project excessive utopia. It responds in an improvisational, undogmatic, creative way to circumstances, helping people still survive and thrive. How can we be realistic about what this nation is about and still sustain hope, acknowledging that we're up against so much?

When I talk to young people these days, there's a sense in which they're in an anti-idealist mode and mood. They want to keep it real. And keeping it real means, in fact, understanding that the white supremacy you thought you could push back permeates every nook and cranny of this nation so deeply that you ought to wake up and recognize how deep it is.

That to me is a very serious challenge. If we were to go back to 1965, and, say, put a few black faces in high places, and think that somehow the problem was going to be solved, today's young women and men would say to us, "Don't you realize how naive that is?" They wouldn't say that in the form, "We are victims." They'd be saying, "We're going to get around that some way, but it's not going to be the way you think. We're going to get around it the way most American elites have, by hustling, by stepping outside the law, by shaping the law in our interest, and so forth." And people say, "Oh, but that's rather downbeat talk, isn't it? That's not very hopeful." And the young people say, "Well, the level of hope is based on the reality." Now, what do we say back to them? Part of my response has to do with a certain kind of appeal to their moral sense. Part of it has to do with their connection to a tradition, from grandmother to grandfather to father to mother, that has told them that it is often better to be right and moral as opposed to being simply successful in the cheapest sense.