On the first Sunday of Advent, we light the first candle which symbolizes Hope. Hope in the Old Testament was the expectation of God’s promised Messiah and freedom from the bondage of Pharoah. Hope in the New Testament is the expectation of Jesus’ birth, and liberation from the domination of Rome. The candle represents the coming of light into a dark world, and each Advent candle provides additional light to dispel the increasing darkness with the approach of the year’s Longest Night. Winter is my least favorite season, but I have always loved Advent—the blues and purples in church, the Christmas carols, and (OK, admit it) all the baked goodies. But today, I feel more like Diogenes, wandering about aimlessly with a lantern in futile search of an honest man. Finding HOPE??? Forget about it!
Since the second election of Trump, I have felt like I have been trapped in a nightmare from which I cannot wake up. This has nothing to do with partisanship (I identify politically as an independent), but rather from witnessing the descent of the United States of America into the type of regime at which we formerly pointed the righteous finger of judgment. At the macro level, we are witnessing democracy, the rule of law and our Constitution (especially the First Amendment) being dismantled and shredded. At the mezzo, or intermediate level, people are being rounded up into gulag-style detention centers without due process. The Department of Justice has become a prosecutorial weapon against political enemies of the regime while real crimes against the public (committed by wealthy cronies) are pardoned. At the micro level, we are seeing our neighbors increasingly hungry, housing insecure, precariatized and fearful of the future.
On top of a near constant bombardment of lies, cruelty, hate, gaslighting, hypocrisy, greed, lawlessness and incompetence is the realization that a majority of American voters elected a malignant narcissist sociopath. Although one can argue that the first time Trump was elected by operation of the idiosyncrasies of an antiquated electoral system, he nonetheless commanded a substantial “movement” built upon a combination of legitimate populist economic grievance enmeshed in a form of tribal hatred (both real and manufactured). However, long before Trump descended the golden escalator in 2015, the combined forces of white supremacy, Christo-fascism (aka Christian Nationalism) and oligarchy were already strengthening their grip into a totalizing empire.
All the while my faith tradition preaches the gospel of hope. Unable to find hope anywhere, I despair of my own fecklessness and irrelevance—becoming convinced that I might even be deserving of the hell we are living in for failing to thwart it. At various points over the past 10 years, my wonderful sister has attempted to alleviate the hopelessness with arguments that things have been way worse in the past. We are admonished about the dangers of temporal egotism, or the worldview that one’s own time and place is existentially significant; e.g., the ever-recurring prophesies of “end times” that never seem to materialize within the lifetimes of the so-called “prophets.” But yet, even with the knowledge that prior times have been worse—material life was harder for everyone, a small wealthy class had a complete stranglehold on political, civic, and cultural life (much like today), women and slaves were deemed to be white man’s property, and African Americans were killed for the audacity to vote—it does little to bring comfort in the moment.
In the course of learning about America’s shameful history of slavery and white supremacy, I marvel at the ability of our African American brothers and sisters to maintain hope in dark times—not just over their own lifetimes, but across centuries and generations. Imagine that you are a slave in 1860. After 246 years of your people’s enslavement there is a war, and one day you are declared to be free. Slavery is abolished in 1865 (13th Amendment), you and anyone in your family that was born here are granted the full rights of citizenship in 1868 (14th Amendment), and now the full power of the federal government has been deployed against state authorities who would deprive you of your new right to vote in 1870 (15th Amendment).
With ownership of one’s own labor and the ability to participate in civic life, former slaves began to build better lives for themselves and their families. A sense of fulfilled hope was in the air among African American communities. But then along came Jim Crow at the end of Reconstruction in 1877. Former slaveholders found ways to prevent former slaves from voting through the use of poll taxes and other voter registration restrictions that were targeted at African Americans, but which also adversely affected poor white people. When the laws were not sufficient to prevent determined and successful African Americans from voting, vigilante justice stepped in with threats, burning of homes, lynchings and other forms of terror.
Yet, the African American community maintained hope in the promise of democracy and equality before the law. They kept this hope alive over another 87 years—nearly three generations—before the law again brought new, real hope. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ensured they regained the full rights of citizenship that had been stolen by the Jim Crow South.
From 1965 until the turn of the 20th century, African Americans again experienced a renewed fulfillment of hope. Black Americans could now be (and were) elected to state legislatures and Congress. Some rose to be Justices on the Supreme Court as well as other positions of power and privilege. Three Black Americans have been elected as state Governors—Doug Wilder (VA, 1990-1994), Deval Patrick (MA, 2007-2015) and Wes Moore (MD, elected in 2022). Like a child in the back seat on a long car trip who periodically inquires, “Are we there yet?”, Black Americans in this time period had real evidence of movement in the right direction. This culminated in the election of Barack Obama to the US Presidency, which could have led a reasonable person to believe that we were indeed, finally “there” in a post-racial society.
But white supremacy, racism and the colonialist impulse of empire and domination had never really gone away. Some research suggests that conspiracy theories about voter fraud started after the 2000 election, along with new mandates for electronic voting equipment (which have since been updated to also require a paper trail) and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002. As voting rights expanded and the process of voting was made easier (to accommodate working and disabled people), new conspiracy theories were being propounded about “voter fraud.” Or rather, the “wrong” people were voting. Following the election of Obama in 2008, the ghost of Jim Crow came back to haunt us in new forms of voter suppression targeted at black and brown voters and low-income communities. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act.
Black Americans cherish the right to vote perhaps more than the rest of us do who take it for granted. Blacks dress up to vote—sometimes wearing their Sunday best when they go to the polls because voting is a sacred occasion and not just a civic duty. Because Blacks vote in person in greater proportion than whites do, new stringent voter identification laws disproportionately (by design) impact these communities. While requiring someone to prove who they are and where they live before they can register to vote is perfectly logical, the documents required to do so are targeted to “favorable” populations: drivers licenses (folks who own motor vehicles), military ID, and passports (the jet set). Yet, in spite of centuries of nefarious efforts to thwart them, Blacks still show up to vote like they believe in the promise of equal rights and democracy.
So, what is wrong with me—with my white privilege and never having had real problems with voting, even with moving dozens of times across eleven states—that I have such a cynical (and hopeless) view of the system? Perhaps because I came of age during the Civil Rights era, when things were improving, I believed in the inevitability of forward progress. I grew up in the middle class—when America actually had a robust middle class. I heard Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King (in real time) declare that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. While I was too young to protest the Vietnam War, I marched for Equal Rights in the late 1970s. I remember Sandra Day O’Connor being appointed as the first woman Justice to the US Supreme Court. I watched joyfully as LGBTQ friends felt safe enough to come out of the closet and openly live together as couples. I was in law school when the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990.
Yet, with all the outward signs of forward progress, there were dark clouds on the horizon. I sensed that most of us were working harder for less at least a decade before former President Clinton said so in a campaign speech. I wrote my first paper on underemployment in 1988, with the then-unheard-of-argument that workers had more skills than jobs were demanding. Today, mainstream economists are beginning to recognize a long-term pattern of declining job quality. But there was more going on than jobs getting worse. Before law school, the advice to employee advocates was to bring the case in federal court (if you could jurisdictionally), because the statutorily defined elements, standards of proof and remedies favored employees. However, this began to change when I got out of law school. Although the laws on the books had not changed, the federal judiciary had taken an unfavorable turn against cases brought by Plaintiffs against corporations generally, but especially cases brought by employees against employers. If your client was an employee with a claim against a corporate employer, you had a better chance of success in state court, notwithstanding narrower definitions and fewer remedies.
In my naiveté, I believed that the decline of decent jobs and a systemic war on workers’ rights would be something that people could rally around—regardless of their race, gender, religion, or any of the other characteristics that tend to divide us. There was practically no discussion about stagnating wages and the decline of job quality anywhere except in a few obscure academic journals. The media was content to ballyhoo the lives of the rich and famous, celebrity worship, and all the great new gee whiz tech gizmos. Most Americans didn’t truly “wake up” to the underlying deterioration in our everyday work and civic life until the COVID-19 pandemic.
While most of us were working harder for less—in jobs that had had no future of real advancement—people of color were gaining in the job market. Because the “good news” for women and minorities was being covered in the media while the decline of decent middle- class jobs was ignored, this created the perception (especially among working class white men), that the “system” was advantaging “others,” but leaving them behind.
One line of thought was that although African-Americans (as a statistical group) had not caught up to whites in terms of income, wealth and power, they had seen real gains over the past century, and this allowed them to be more hopeful about the future. That is, the relevant question isn’t about where you are NOW, but the direction things are going. Indeed, some research supports this theory. Poor Blacks have optimism levels 1.4 points higher (on an 11-point scale) than poor whites—and even slightly higher than wealthy Blacks. (The optimism gap between rich and poor people generally is 0.6 points.) This higher level of optimism has resulted in lower levels of stress and longer lifespans. The so-called Deaths of Despair tend to be higher among middle-aged white men employed (or formerly employed) in blue-collar occupations.
So, seeing or experiencing progress (either for yourself or people like you) can increase optimism, which increases other quality-of-life- factors, which makes finding hope easier. If this is the answer, it means that we should look for signs of improvement anywhere to provide hope for improvement somewhere else. Even assuming that this is true, it still doesn’t answer how African-Americans maintained hope through the long period of slavery and Jim Crow—when visible signs or evidence of progress were hard to find or nonexistent. Explanations for this include tight-knit and extended families, supportive communities, and a strong cohesive culture, including a strong faith culture.
The hopefulness of our Black brothers and sisters is even more admirable when viewed in the context of historical trauma. Research has found that trauma is not only stored in an individual’s body (somatic memory), it is passed down through generations. The great-grandchildren of children growing up in war zones today will be adversely affected regardless of their current circumstances, just as today’s descendants of slavery and Jim Crow are adversely affected. Attempts by the current regime to erase this history cannot ever erase the subcellular experience of the past, but is likely to aggravate it.
Yet, over centuries of dehumanization, the descendants of African slaves have built an extraordinary resiliency. American Blacks have created an admirable culture of resilience born by long-term resistance and kept alive with practices of joy. These practices are often deeply connected with faith rituals. Upon learning that my husband and I liked chorale music, a Black friend invited us to her church to hear their choir. As the only white faces in the church that day, we were greeted with friendly welcome. Not only was the music fantastic (we had paid for concerts that weren’t nearly as good), we were amazed at the noisy joyful energy of the rest of the congregation. By contrast, our own faith practice—familiar and comforting as it is—seemed aloof and detached. Perhaps it is this energy that gives Blacks hope. Or does inherent hope give them energy?
Dr. Tanisha Hill-Jarrett, a professor of neurology at the University of California in San Francisco, has applied the science of neuropsychology to help discover the source of Black “radical hope.” This includes the ability to imagine what is possible without getting mired down in the reality of the now. The “Black radical imagination” includes not just critique of current power structures, but the ideals of Afrofuturism and motivations behind the Black Lives Matter movement. Centuries of practice in acknowledging the reality of the present while at the same time imagining a better future develops what neurologists term neuroplasticity, or the ability to actually change (i.e., “rewire”) one’s neural structures and connections. Radical hope must be kept alive, because “a vision for the future without belief that the outcome is attainable leaves little worth acting upon.”
Black communities have historically been tight-knit, forging strong social support networks of mutual aid and shared cultural identity. Which leads to a theory that a culture based on collective rather than individual narratives is more conducive to hopefulness. When the focus is on the welfare of the community as a whole rather than individual accumulation and achievement, it is easier to envision a future that “works” for everyone.
So, can all of us imagine a world where everyone has enough but no one has too much? Where humanity lives in harmony with the Earth and all its inhabitants? Where everyone can access the education, health care and community support they need to flourish? Where extraction, expropriation and exploitation are NOT the means and measure of success? Where all labor, but particularly care labor, is valued and appropriately rewarded? Where we are no longer dependent on a globalized corporatocracy for subsistence, but interdependent with our neighbors? Where anyone—of any race, color, nationality, religion, gender orientation or economic status—can visit another community of any race, color, nationality, religion, gender orientation or economic status, and be greeted with the same hospitality as my husband and I received in that Black Southern church decades ago?
Maybe we can imagine such a thing. But do we believe that it’s possible?
Where can I sign up for some lessons?
