where is the hope?

Visual description: An image of two circles connected by a scribbly thread in bold black ink. The small circle on the left says ‘HOPE’ with uppercase letters, white font, and a black background. The large circle on the right says ‘despair’ with lowercase letters, white font, and a black background.

In We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, Mariame Kaba writes of “hope as a discipline”.

Kaethe Weingarten introduces a “reasonable hope”, describing hope as a communal project rather than an isolated feeling.

Robin DG Kelley renders hope an unhelpful concept, emphasizing “only the promise of struggle” not utopias.

So is there hope? Is there not hope? Is hope useful? What’s the common thread here?

Practice. Continued action. A doing of life. Specifically, in the muck, amongst, alongside, and with other people in the service of something beyond ourselves even through the messiness of despair driven by a world bent on violence, punishment, and power over. Hope (or not hope), it seems, thrives in connection and collaboration. Yet everything about the existing dominant systems we live under breeds disconnection and isolation. Neocolonialism. Racial capitalism. Cisheteropatriarchy. Simply big words for how to use fear as a powerful tactic to keep us in competition with our kins and at a distance from ourselves. And no one is exempt from these influences, not even those who hold certain privileges. Because even pretty cages are still cages, after all.

And yet in spite of the fear, we are always seeking creative ways to act from outside of that fear. To rebel against the fear even outside of our own awareness. I’m not entirely sure if ‘hope’ as a concept helps or doesn’t help here. That is for you to decide. What I know for sure is that when people come to consult with me about the problems that plague their lives, I care about all the steps, no matter how small they may seem, that it must have taken for them to get to this moment where a once suffocated story is now being shared from one human to another. This is a bold act of resistance to the fear-mongering systems that encourage repression rather than expression. Therein lies a desire for connection and collaboration. Therefore, these steps are valuable and connect to a thread much greater than you and I could ever imagine on our own. Every prior step meant something and represented an act of something significant. No action is trivial regardless of how larger society measures “progress”.

Perhaps a different question is called for. When you are asked about your struggles, remember that the real question is and has always been…

How have you been doing hope?

And let’s move from there…