Love > Hope: On Nourishment for Movements
“Hope is not magic” DeRay McKesson argues in his book subtitled The Case for it. Rather, hope is work (p. 11). Hope does not constitute an unwavering belief in the outcome regardless of the process. Instead, hope exists via movements. He differentiates it from faith, the latter of which fluctuates with the news cycle. Black people embody this distinction: that despite indisputable justification to wallow in despair, Black people celebrate their endurance and the promise of more to come. The hope Black people carry is “fuel for this nation” (p. 9).
McKesson is not an abolitionist–he’s known to some as a Ferguson opportunist–but the abolitionist author I admire the most, Mariame Kaba, espouses a similar ethic, often associated with the quotation “hope is a discipline.” In her latest, she expounds:
“For me, hope is not a metaphor; it’s a lived practice. It isn’t a thing I possess. Rather, I have to remake it daily. I don’t have hope. I do hope. It’s an active process that I have to regularly commit to–hope not as an emotion but as a discipline. Hope for me is grounded in the reality that wondrous things happen alongside and parallel to the terrible. Every single day.” (p. 232, emphasis added)
I’ve embraced a version of this interpretation in my work lately. I enjoy little confidence that our movement will culminate in a reality where homelessness is a relic of the past, that the capitalist industry erected to ameliorate housing injustice will dismantle itself because our work is complete. But I do hope in the process. I imbue hope in progress. In my specific role organizing groups of people who give a damn about homelessness, I take courage when I see them cultivate solidarity with one another, nurturing trusted relationships and inching closer to loving accountability. To design the architecture for such togetherness is medicinal. But only temporary.
Climate activists must especially require a reimagination of hope because the evidence is grim. Only worldwide behavior change and urgent destruction of empires to the tune of mass de-industrialization stands a chance at halting the catastrophes of human-caused global warming. I have even heard climate-justice advocates reframe hope to describe faith that the world will be just fine: it’s just that humanity won’t be around to witness it. But not to worry, something beautiful will emerge from our remains. Yeesh. Not for nothing, but this reads to me like abandon all hope.
In October 2017, Stephen Colbert interviewed Ta-Nehisi Coates. The quintessential well-meaning white liberal, pocketing millions as compensation for Trump insults, Colbert beseeches the MacArthur genius for hopeful comforts. This conversation took place just shy of a year after the election of 45 during which Coates’ media tour plugged his Atlantic piece Donald Trump is the First White President. Liberal whites remained shell shocked (Black and Brown people hurting, too/more, but sans surprise). This is the context in which Colbert sought some salve from the lauded author.
Colbert: “You have had a hard time in some interviews expressing a sense of hope that things will get better in this country. Do you have any hope tonight for the people out there about how we could be a better country, have better race relations, better politics?
Coates: “No.”
The host tries again.
“I’m not asking you to make [bleep] up. I’m asking you if you see any chance for change in America.”
Coates: “I would have to make [bleep] up to actually answer that question in a satisfying way.”
Colbert ponders whether demographic shifts might facilitate progress, the eventuality of white people finding themselves the racial minority. Coates explains how whiteness never sits still and will evolve to preserve itself irrespective of percentage alterations. Colbert visibly frustrated, the interview concludes abruptly.
I saw myself in both characters when I witnessed this live. Here Colbert represented many white folks who lamented Trump’s election but with the air of someone who’d experienced political hardship for the first time or just learned about structural racism. The ache beckoned relief from some tonic. “I don’t like this feeling. How do I fix it?” he must’ve wondered. I, too, agonize over white supremacy and grasp for solutions. But that is because I do not love the problem enough, as I’ve heard it described. Hope for some spiritual opiates can reflect denial of the depth and infection of the laceration. Some hope enthusiasts belittle the gravity of oppression. And so I also saw myself in Coates, a student of history speaking with clear-eyed consciousness that the wound is probably fatal.
McKesson’s and Kaba’s reframing of hope as something apart from beliefs and separate from the likelihood of the realities we pursue belies the subtext of their message: the cause is futile, but please don’t retreat. So much contortion to protect a virtue that hinges on an outcome we are unlikely to realize.
I worry, furthermore, that the centrality of hope in the parlance of nonprofit-industrial-complex executives is not just ineffective but sometimes self-serving and even sinister. Industry leaders and politicians can weaponize hope to ensure the funds roll in and the underpaid workforce stays put. They need nonprofit laborers to endure oppressive workplaces while the institutions themselves prioritize self-perpetuation not revolution. Because our nonprofit ecosystem still models charity, not justice, we seldom attend to the structures that propagate the suffering our services purport to ameliorate, the effect of which upholds hope as a false idol.
I do not argue that we should abandon all hope nor that our failure is certain. I hasten to differentiate collective hope for movements from individual hope for ourselves as human beings: my everyday hope keeps me alive. Moreover, hope does not equal gratitude, and the latter is indeed essential both for personal wellbeing and collective progress. But as it pertains to social-justice movements, rather than reinterpreting hope and disputing which version is valid, we could ask different questions. Don’t abandon ship, just board a different vessel with a similar trajectory but sustainable fuel. Coincidentally, the antidote may reside in Kaba’s camp all the same.
o o o
A Black man in his 60s raised in Brooklyn, a mentor once told me that people who proclaim “abolish the police” have never lived in the ghetto. I appreciate the sentiment and his audience in the moment (me)–conversation about policing bleeds into conversation about safety, which is fraught. But his claim is just untrue. Virtually every author-activist considered a leader in abolitionist movements today is a Black, Brown, or Indigenous woman, most of whom grew up in poverty. And most whose work I’ve ingested identifies as a survivor of violence. These leaders have experienced profound trauma, ghettoization and otherwise. It’s these women who lead the struggle for a world where literally no one is completely removed from society, including the activists’ tormentors. Where accountability abounds but doesn’t mean punishment that perpetuates violence; where accountability mends the harm that was inflicted, restoring relationships and community as much as possible and engendering real safety.
As an aside: much overlap exists between leftist wonks pedaling marxist or socialist ideology (usually vocalized by Bad Faith pod in my earbuds) and abolitionist circles, both groups with which I associate myself, but god knows the left of the former ilk is missing the love part abolitionists represent. Listen for hours and you may not hear why marxists espouse the politics they revere.
Surely the locus of our love as abolitionists is the people whom imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy targets (hey, bell hooks), those whom the state criminalizes. But love is infectious; it transmits to those who inflict harm the most, because they, too, are someone’s family. They are our kin. Perhaps no other social-justice orientation than abolition embodies the ethic love your enemies (Matthew 5:44–hey look, a bible reference. Weird, right?). Abolitionists remain motivated when hope loses steam because our love for the wellbeing and healing of humanity and the world endures regardless of circumstances. Apocalyptic political realities hardly hamper this love.
If Christian language doesn’t bother you, try another New Testament reinterpretation on for size. If god is love, as I was taught, then love is god, which is to say: love is the source of all things, the end of all things, the ground of being, the connective tissue between all of us, that which gives things their thingness, existence itself. I need not sell you on the centrality of love for human relationships: small wonder, then, that it’s more nutritious sustenance for our movements.
My street medicine teachers corroborate, if not the PIC abolition part. Other than the people experiencing housing deprivation themselves, street outreach providers have the clearest view of the depths of human suffering, at least in the US. We would forgive each one for resigning from overwhelm and gloom. Street medicine sage Brett Feldman taught me that, in general, three ethics drive people into and within this work.
First, those driven by duty: my privilege denotes responsibility for reversing the systemic causes of my unfair advantages.
Second, justice: homelessness is an ethical violation that must be redressed.
Then love: tender and unyielding compassion for people in suffering embodied in solidarity.
Most, he explains, operate from a combination of drivers: you can orient yourself on the triangle such as he did with a yellow dot in the image below. All are valid. But, in his experience, you’re more likely to prevent burnout when fueled by love because you have already made the choice once and for all: your commitment to the people victimized by structural oppression endures independent of the likelihood you will ever upend those structures altogether. This love is not paternalism, reaching down to pull someone up: it is love in solidarity, descending to the depths alongside those down below. Indeed, what else is it but love when unhoused people administer narcan to their peers or keep each other safe from police raids, for example? What if advocates, politicians, and systems leaders adopted love from the street in their work to dismantle oppressive structures?
I know what time it is in the political calendar as I write: an election season arguably more terrifying than the last two. This may be when we need hope the most. And if my framing doesn’t resonate with your own relationship to burnout prevention, pay it no further attention. But a movement principle is not virtuous if it does not mobilize. The likelihood that Trump will succeed ought not impede us (a Biden victory repulses me barely less anyway). Love for the people who stand to lose the most from oppressive political leadership should carry us forward. And perhaps enough love will legitimize hope.
