The Politics & Tyranny of Hope: Understanding The Tools of Black Suffering and Subjugation
This week’s feature for Ars Poetica’s Writing Series for BIPOC Voices is written by Semassa Boko. All pieces within the series have been curated by Shakilya Lawrence.
This essay is a self-conscious experiment in a burgeoning ethos I wish to cultivate throughout my writing. This world is built on anti-blackness, and because it is structured politically, economically, and psychically by the ghosts of racial slavery — further enforced through the most spectacular and quotidian forms of violence — Black performance of any kind is always executed under a state of coercion. Across mediums, one commonly coerced element of Black performance is the display of trauma for the consumption of audiences. There is the persistent, but insidious belief that somehow the next statistic about black suffering, or display of a dead Black body captured on camera, or Black “voice” relaying the damage wrought upon them by the mechanisms of anti-blackness, or other such attempts to lay bare the “facts of blackness” for the edification of nonblack people, will be the moment that wakes everyone up. The moment that will make undeniable what society must disavow to function — the unbearable nature of Black being, forced to live in a world that thrives off your death.
So, in this written performance, my goal is not to resort to deploying Black pain to validate the gravity of my claims.
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
There is a rich tradition surrounding the concept of hope among Black people in the modern world. Contrary to popular notion, this tradition is not due to some innate characteristic of Black peoples. Instead, it is a response to the unmitigated terror, continuous physical, psychic, and spiritual assaults, and the global vulnerability to premature death that constitutes the Black experience in the modern world—one that was produced through the African slave trade. For many, hope in a better world for the next generation has been the engine allowing them to endure, smile at the youth, and make a way out of no way. In reality, the politics of hope are messy. There is a difference between the hope that Black people cultivate amongst themselves to make it to tomorrow and the sort of hope which is peddled to us to redeem the illusory "goodness" of this world.
Hope is weaponized as part of a permanent war against those who desire the end of an anti-black world as opposed to its rearrangement and reformation. Black people are often chained to hope (and I do not use that language lightly) because we are socialized to believe that only hope can lead to action for change. My war is waged against hope as an imposition. Hope has its place, however like most unchallenged “common sense”, it has become stale and a barrier for true change. This sense of conventional hope conjures a colonial notion of progress that things have only gotten better over time. It is meant to inspire optimism, faith in the U.S. project, coalition with nonblack people, and a positive outlook towards the ability of its institutions to fix its internal problems. But the reality of the history of Black struggle in the United States demonstrates otherwise.
Photo by Dalton Caraway on Unsplash
Every time our wildest dreams reach a fever pitch we are faced with the siege of a brutal backlash. There was the Reconstruction Era followed by Jim Crow and lynch mobs; the Civil Rights and Black Power eras were followed by mass incarceration and the gutting of social safety nets; and the first Black head of the U.S. empire was followed by an unfolding neo-fascist regime. I see no progress, just the evolution of subjugation— the perfection of slavery. Black blood is used rhetorically and in the national imagination in order to constantly rejuvenate and energize this “democratic experiment” we have all been lumped into. Representation — Black faces in high places to serve the interests of the U.S. empire — will not lead to freedom.
““It appears that my worst fears have been realized: we have made progress in everything yet nothing has changed.””
Hopelessness is treated as a disease and defect, villainizing those who choose not to be seduced by reassuring platitudes. Purveyors of hope would ask that you not look into the abyss, meditate on Black suffering, or mourn the reality of perpetual Black death. This is born of fear — fear that the blackness of interminable violation will consume and prevent you from being a properly disciplined member of society. Cornel West, the famed Black intellectual and tireless freedom fighter, draws on what he calls “tragicomic hope,” a hope that comes from the blues. For West, the blues “is an autobiographical chronicle of a personal catastrophe expressed lyrically and endured with grace and dignity” that allows people to “look unflinchingly at catastrophic conditions.” So what must we do once these catastrophic conditions are acknowledged?
The “politics of refusal” is a praxis spearheaded by Black and Indigenous feminist thinkers and steeped in a long history of Black people rejecting a world built on our backs. Saidiya Hartman, Audra Simpson, Mariame Kaba, and others demonstrate that Black desire is in excess of this world, and only visions that allow our imaginations to run wild are capable of getting us free. These desires will never consist of being included and recognized in a world that maintains its hierarchies through anti-black violence. A desire for recognition and inclusion in an anti-black world will only allow illusory and temporary respite at the expense of the most vulnerable Black people, including QTGNC folk, prisoners, sex workers, the disabled, and the houseless. All of these groups are super-exploited to maintain the fictions of normativity within society.
So what are we hoping for? There are those who would ask us to demand greater.
The tyranny of hope includes enforced optimism. For those in power, it works to police the Black imagination so that we do not dare ask ourselves what would happen if we opted out of all the systems that are complicit in our subjugation. Instead, we are expected to unite in search of a dream permanently deferred. This way, we do not lift our heads to see that the trajectory of this optimistic hope is circular rather than linear. One of the many reasons why displays of Black death, pain, and suffering does not raise consciousness in the minds of nonwhite people is because Black existence is in excess of nonblack imagination. If we can’t even properly represent the terror of slavery now, how can we believe that we can properly imagine a future outside of it? This is why every new moment of Black resistance comes as a surprise to most nonblack people — their sanity would be blown apart if they had to constantly grapple with Black suffering.
Often within our community, we are told something along the lines that we must not lose hope because our ancestors fought to make this country a better place. I read that history differently. I would argue that Black people are not fighting to make this country better. Black people have been relegated to the bottom of a hierarchy of human value so we fight to survive, and everyone else reaps the benefits. That fear of losing hope is really a fear of defeatism, but hopelessness does not equal inaction. There is no way in hell that all of the Black slaves who revolted against their masters believed that their actions would lead to freedom. They moved because they felt that they had to, regardless of the outcome. And yet without those struggles, abolition would have never been achieved. When I imagine how to approach social change, I imagine from the position of the slave in the bleakest of circumstances.
Afropessimism is an ensemble of questions and interventions that posits blackness as a condition of perpetual slavery known as “social death” and identifies anti-black violence of the modern world as necessary for all other peoples’ psychic stability. This discourse seeks to meditate on, rather than analogize Black suffering as similar to that of others. Frank Wilderson, the most vocal proponent of afropessimism, understands it to be pessimistic about the ability of the current tools of social change to truly liberate Black people.
Photo by Binyamin Mellish from Pexels
The “pessimism” in afropessimism is a beginning, not an end. Within our modern world, there is another insidious yet pervasive idea that only an optimistic hope can inspire action. I must constantly ask myself: 'what orientations towards struggle and social change make my enemies comfortable, and why?' I’m tired of believing the lie that Black suffering is instrumental towards some end, towards better days, towards some moral arc of the universe bending towards justice. The loss of hope means that everything is fair game. It is the catalyst to new and untested forms of action, fresh ideas, and renewed vigor against the prescriptions of "hope". A slave cannot know what they are fighting for in any concrete sense, because even their masters are not free.
Afropessimism is not the idea that there is no chance for things to get better. It is rather a confrontation with the potential reality: if it is the case that they will never get better, what will you choose to do?
For more on Afropessimism, here is an abridged list of essential authors, texts, and other resources:
Frank Wilderson - Afropessimism and Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms,
Frank Wilderson on F.U.C. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43Ej_8dfn6I
Saidiya Hartman - Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Jared Sexton - “Afro-pessimism: The Unclear Word” http://www.rhizomes.net/issue29/sexton.html
Hortense Spillers - “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”
Semassa Boko is a cultural worker, freelance writer, and current PhD student in Sociology and Critical Theory at the University of California, Irvine. He is driven by the need to pose rigorous and generative questions regarding social change, violence, war, Black music, and aesthetics through his scholarly research as well as through music reviews, poetry, speeches, and various forms of community involvement. Black study is his way of life and Black liberation defines his dreams.
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