Last week was rough. I was feeling really cynical about the possibility of creating change. I reread parts of James Baldwin’s No Name in the Street which was the first book that he published after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
I turned to No Name in the Street for solace, but where I hoped to find solace, I found more cynicism. Baldwin notes that the Civil Rights Movement demanded of white Americans, “a generosity, a clarity, and a nobility which they did not dream of demanding from themselves.” He suggests that so many of the desires for equality were centered on changing the hearts and minds of white people who could not look critically at themselves to make those changes. Re-reading this, I wondered how anyone was supposed to get powerful people to change their hearts and minds if James Baldwin couldn’t do it? Talking to white people, hoping that they will change, convincing them that reform is not useful, can be a seductive act that cultivates possibility and hope, but is often left at just that: talking.
I went to my fellowship class on Thursday, and as our kick-off, we were presented with quotes on leadership that we were supposed to read and then choose one that resonated with us. This one from John W. Gardner slapped me in my cynical face: “The prime function of a leader is to keep the hope alive.”
Thinking about hope, I remembered Mariame Kaba‘s wise words, “Hope is a discipline” and that it requires maintenance, revisiting, and also attention. Equating hope to discipline also implies its difficulty and the required work (not capitalistic work, but an undertaking that requires effort with a humanity-based outcome, not money, as the result).
Her book, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us was published by Haymarket Books in 2020 to offer an argument for abolition amidst and after the uprisings for Black Lives.
In her interview with Marc Lamont Hill for his podcast Coffee and Books, she comments that the police, “cop-ganda,” and the mythology around police officers have stifled our political imagination and our ability to think about managing life without them. She mentions Paula Rojas’ essay, “Are the Cops in Our Heads and Hearts?” which narrates the difficulties that South America has faced to create democracies because, “Historically, both political and revolutionary struggles focus on toppling state power and replacing it with people’s power. One problem with this model is that most of these movements re-created oppressive governance structures modeled on the same system they were trying to replace.” These movements emphasize not just winning a specific political goal, but creating new communities that model a vision for liberation. While direct confrontations with state power are ongoing and necessary, these are actually just one small part of the struggle, “To understand this involves reversing one’s perspective: rejecting the negative and state-centered viewpoint—which defines people by what they lack (needy, excluded, marginalized)—and adopting another way of looking which starts with the differences that they have created in order then to visualize other possible paths.”
The systems that we operate and exist in limit us. I need to be reminded of this when I get frustrated with change because I cannot always blame the person whose mind I’m trying to change; I also need to get frustrated with the systems that have conditioned and created the limitations that dictate our perception of reality and our perception of our ability to change it.
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