In this dialogue we will explore how hope and hopelessness manifest in our struggles for racial justice.  Where do our feelings of hope and hopelessness come from?  When do they show up, and when do they feel most strong?  How does hopelessness create barriers for engaging in long-term racial justice organizing, and how can we cultivate hope even in our lowest moments?

While this dialogue will focus largely on our own personal experiences with feelings of hope and hopelessness in our daily lives, interpersonal relationships, and movement organizing, we thought these readings might help stimulate some conversations about the role of both hope and hopelessness in activism and in maintaining systems of power and oppression.  Please take that which serves you and leave that which does not.

The Machinery of Hopelessness, David Graeber

Hope is the Root of Activism, Rev. Jim Conn

Toward a Politics of Hope? Activism and Gendered Labour, Janet Newman

Activist Burnout: Tired, Overwhelmed and Hopeless, Shauna Aura Knight

Dialogue Notes:
These are rough, uncut, unfiltered, and anonymous notes taken at the dialogue. We get that these may not be very readable to those who were not in attendance at the dialogue, and, honestly, sometimes even to those of us who were. We still feel it is important to keep them available as part of our accountability process and for archiving and reference purposes.  Some of these notes have been digested/transformed into blogs.

Check-in Themes:

• Lack of deep reflection in our lives and movements
• Desire to be in close political union to get a glimpse of what systemic resistance looks like
• Haven’t had hope for awhile – aware of somatic impact of hopelessness
• Institutional experience of seeing them starting to get what they don’t get, humility
• Moments of hope, then crushing collective traumas
• More excited hopeful since moving to the Bay and seeing action, not sure if more hopeful about impact, but benefitting from being around others doing the work
• Mixture of personal hope and concern
• Seeing shift within personal relationships and conversations
• Assassination – real and character – and how hard it is to reframe in real time (hard for public to accept now that police violence IS politically motivated assassination, they may see it in 30 years)
• Seeing both powerful conversations as well as narrow denial of implications
• Hopeless the ways social work and social justice aren’t more connected
• Deep hopelessness in work (solitary voice of change within nonprofit industrial complex – which inadvertently led to the organization getting shut down) – now in organization working prefiguratively (trying to build the world we want) – failing, difficult to subvert capitalism while trying to survive within it, but able to name.
• Desire for personal and collective transformation putting a lot of pressure on a love relationship, pressure to be prefigurative in mixed race relationship leading to codependence
• Feeling brutal harshness of the world, feeling impact of running into walls every day
• Hard to believe in the wins, resistance feels stale
• Glimpses into what would it look like to really do something is where some hope is
• Feeling grief and rage is resistance
• Inspired by prefigurative politics, magic and visionary science fiction
• Have felt helpless/hopeless for over 10 years about gender/race injustice – turns into negativity which takes toll on loved ones, eating away at my soul
• Cross-generational appreciation – lessons learned, new energy, new understandings
• Seeing rollbacks (ie abortions) and losing past gains
• Reality of waking up every morning on a dying planet
• Have seen in history that there were moments when movements and change that did happen didn’t seem possible
• Antidepressants are the biggest drug on the market
• Isolation feeds hopelessness
• Faces at the Bottom of the Well – the permanence of racism (why are white people going to give up their privilege?)
• Feel hopeful due to seeing hopelessness as a tool of the oppressor
• Trying to step back and see larger themes
• Being anxious instead of depressed helps stay motivated and hopeful
• White supremacy/Oppression morphs around all our gains
• White people are terrified of what reparations would look like
• Maybe not capable yet of shedding denial

Exploring themes:

• More people named hopelessness than hope
• Multiple people named hope in others
  • Relationship building is what is hopeful
  • Maybe it is hopeful and is a win when we are able to relate to ourselves and each other in ways that are less capitalist, colonial, racist, sexist
• But also need material gains, Not convinced that relationship building is enough
  • State/police are adapting so quickly to our tactics
  • Collective understanding that came from Occupy was of the 1% – created awareness/outrage – if this movement will make black lives matter a global consciousness, that is good, but how will it get swallowed
  • Gratification
  • Able to connect globally to connect movement struggles
  • There are people whose denial has taken a big dent – who are ready
  • In the 80’s, I wouldn’t have been ale to get a room full of white women to discuss racism
• Our standards are intense, leads to deep dissatisfaction
• We are super susceptible to info overload – we may not have intellectual capacity to process it into wisdom/true understanding
  • Need history and framework
  • Overwhelm
• How can we find ways to hate white supremacy without hating ourselves, when we are taught we have so many reasons to hate ourselves
  • Hard to not see myself reflected in leadership roles
  • Defeating to think that my presence here is destructive
  • Most hopeful interactions have been with less politicized POC
  • The culture of radical political organizing and awareness of toxicity of white supremacy is hard – has been redemptive to have my participation/soul acknowledged
  • Don’t want to take someone’s place, using my privilege, not even sure what my place is in change/allyship
• What is the appropriate use of power? Is it always awful and destructive? I’m always making people feel shame, and there isn’t a culture for managing that – takes emotional intelligence to integrate information while feeling shame/guilt/sadness/grief.
  • Idea that silence is violence.. there have always been white people speaking up, but has become imperative. Found myself speaking up in new ways. Scary. Lots of pushback. Exhausting, but I can take it. Time to stop being passive. I find that hopeful, empowering.
  • Living in Oakland – community is more politically aligned, means I’m less often the single radical voice. Brings hope.
  • Basebuilding with white people. Need to talk to all the people who are afraid of losing power. Can’t do that in isolation.
  • Social media/research/info we are putting out there – I think it is changing the waters.
  • Going out to suburbs and encouraging them to organize their own events – learning history together
• What is my stake?
  • Capitalism and white supremacy make my survival questionable
  • What is the stake of a white person?
    • Reduce emotional weight/turmoil
    • Racism is a tool to prop up capitalism
    • The liberation of white workers is predicated on eradication of racism
    • More genuine life, life that isn’t supported by the structures of oppression
    • Emotional/cultural/spiritual development – if you are aware of the stakes, then you have a stake – there is a huge middle ground that doesn’t have that awareness
    • White supremacy/exploitation is holding up capitalism, which is destroying the planet in one generation
    • If they come for you in the morning, they will come for me tonight
    • It is the stake that feels hopeless
    • Leftroots – containing capitalism while revolutionary struggles are happening in order to allow them to blossom
    • We don’t have to do it all, just one part of it
    • Macrocosm/microcosm  – make it small to make it digestible
    • Heartbreaking to see how small/close to home the conversation has to get to awaken people
    • Not just fighting for racial justice, fighting for justice
    • Just the relief of not living in a constant state of terror
    • The human emotions get fed by that – we haven’t found a better way to manage sociopathic rage/greed
    • Aware of how permanently capitalism is engrained on our brains – that have trained us to expect only a certain human behavior – debate over biological inevitability
• even if you can’t defeat capitalism, you’re standing up to it and that’s a lot—things are coming down today that people never thought would
• Think about people in the ANC, in limited space to move in—today we have certain freedoms. so develop a long view. That doesn’t mean step back but…
• with climate change we don’t have a long view
• there are ways to chip away at capitalism through our lives
  • collective businesses, etc. setting up alternate systems
  • these can be the deepest sources of hopelessness, too. prefigurative politics that tend to look a lot like capitalism
  • some people don’t believe it’s possible to prefigure alternatives to capitalism within capitalism. the best we can do is prefigure the next step
  • don’t set ourselves up with unrealistic expectations, because that can be devastating
• think about tech and money and climate change and buying power. If you think about the things you’re willing to give up…everything links to somebody or someone being exploited. that’s part of holding grief—feel your unwillingness to give up something like an iPhone, it makes you confront things, feel the hypocrisy. microcosm/macrocosm
• BDS and not wanting to buy things that support Zionism—there probably isn’t a company that isn’t funding exploitation
• thinking of the arbitrary decisions we make—we hold a lot of contradictions. is it worth the emotional energy to fixate on that guilt? it’s an individual remedy to a collective problem
• But individuals make up the collective. it’s individual awakenings
• not just what you aren’t investing in but what you are—look at BDS, or investing in queer communities. if you have more of an investment mindset, you’re not thinking about avoiding so much
• redistribution of wealth, actual systemic changes, those are where hope comes from, but it helps to personally have that awareness. foundation to doing the systemic work
• do you have the internal reaction that it’s OK that I’ve bought this socially conscious item—conscientious consumer? lots of people do stop there, but some don’t, so is this kind of individualizing strategy ultimately helpful? Only if there are people pulling them to the next step. Lots of people don’t move to the larger structural resistance. That requires a ton of work.
• We didn’t vote to be consumers in the belly of the beast of a capitalist system. Don’t beat ourselves up for being in it and surviving in it.
• Capitalism creates the need for our consumption. And consumption is what enables our survival in this society (business clothes, laptop, etc). Wouldn’t it be nice if we lived in a system where we weren’t required to buy all these things to support ourselves?
• don’t buy into the individualist narrative (certain buying decisions, etc.) if it’s going to inhibit your ability to collectively organize. It’s a question of strategy. Can we get away from capitalism if we just stop using so much? Or do we work to bring it down and then we just don’t have all those things anymore.
• You can’t have a collective movement without personally living it out. Intersection of racism, capitalism, etc.

The Problem of Work: Post-Work Imaginaries

Kathy Weeks

• Hope: something that can be fostered by degrees.
• 2 elements: 1) cognitive faculty: thinking through time thru the media of imagination and reason (memory)  2) emotion or affect, in contrast to fear/anxiety. Train and cultivate it in both senses thinking of hope as a political decision. Visioning as a verb.

Check out: practices of cultivating hope 

• remind ourselves that hopelessness is the master’s tool. I choose hope
• Even in subjective hopelessness, you can lift yourself through still making decisions that support passions
• mindfulness, meditation
• do something in the morning, remembering your stake and doing something for that
• hiking
• action is the antidote to despair. imagine action as something more obtainable
• getting back into direct organizing work. think about what a cadre looks like
• there are so many things we weren’t taught and didn’t know! Reading Black women organizer theorists, refusing to be hopeless
• Octavia’s Brood
• Having more conversations like this
• Holding hope and non-attachment together. Things are changing, so not being attached to how they’re happening, if it’s not the way we want them to. Personal base-building, helps in feeling useful
• Centering environmental justice more in anti-racism
• Deep one-on-ones. Spiritual practice. Joining a revolutionary cadre organization. needed but daunting
• Organization is commitment, Grace Lee Boggs