This morning I listened to Krista Tippett interview Ta-Nahesi Coates for her podcast, On Being. I normally do love this podcast as an uplifting alternative to my other favorite podcast with a strikingly similar, preposition-centric name, On Point. Ironically, I listen to On Being to get out of the despair cycle that listening to news prompts for me.
Krista, I love you, but you white-centered the hell out of that interview, and could not resist asking Coates, who claimed over and over that he wasn't there to give white people directions, much less hope, for directions for white people, and hope for white people. I was scratching my ears out.
In this historical moment, a lot of white people like me are freaking out, because of Trump, because of climate change, because of various and sundry forms of oppression that some of us are just waking up to, and we're looking to those who have been living in that oppression for "hope." I confess, I have been one of those white people. But I have quickly learned that this demand is cruel, obnoxious, and ignorant.
Why do we keep asking oppressed peoples for signs of "hope"? Because it assures us that the status quo isn't that bad, that the suffering isn't so awful as to be hopeless, and that we can just keep on keeping on. If someone who has suffered so much can still feel hope, then we don't have to worry about our complicity in further suffering.
It's a dangerous argument to make, I know. I'm not saying that people who have suffered a lot shouldn't feel hope, or that their hope further justifies their oppressor. I am not suggesting this at all. But I would like people like myself, and perhaps Krista Tippett, to look inside our white selves a bit more to figure out what others' hope is really doing for us. Why do we feel we need evidence of it so badly? Hope is not inherently a bad or a white thing. I have lots of time for hope in other contexts. I'm just focusing here on this particular thing that I've observed since Trump's ascendance, when a lot of people like me had the wool removed from their eyes, and all of a sudden really, really, really needed a hit of hope.
At the end of the interview, Krista shared some questions from the audience. One question was from a set of school teachers who wanted to know something like "How can we maintain hope with our students when we're all suffering so much?" It's a question that seems to get asked more and more of all kinds of speakers, teachers, pundits, politicians, activists... No matter what the content of the presentation, no matter the expertise of the speaker, "wherefore hope?" seems the audience's main concern.
It's what I'm asked, too, and if you've read any of this blog, you know that the question of "hope" is of great interest to me. But I'm profoundly ambivalent about it. "On the one hand, on the other," is usually how I answer this question when I speak about the role of "hope" in teaching college students about the future of environmental justice.
Two reasons I am particularly balking at hope after listening to Krista talk with Ta-Nahesi:
1. Why should the people who've been most oppressed also be burdened with the work of giving white people hope? Coates responded to that question with this: "I reject the premise of the question." Right on. Amen. Fuck that question.
This new desire for "hope" smacks of the privilege of never having to find it before, the privilege of breathing, eating, and sleeping hope all your life, like I have.
Also, if audiences can't find hope in the content that the presenter is offering, the expertise of the presenter, the thoughts the presenter shares and the model they offer, then woe on them. The presenter is showing hope by what they do, what they're saying, the work they do. If we can't put two and two together, if we can't develop our own capacity for figuring out where to find hope, if we're looking to other people to tell us where to find it, we're ill-equipped to be hopeful. We're doomed to our own passiveness, our own lack of imagination, our own consumer-mentality that we can just order it online and just, poof!, have hope.
Hope isn't in a mantra or a beautiful turn of phrase. It isn't in a person or set of people. Hope is a hard practice. It's not even the end-game.
2. Which brings me to the second irksome thing about the way hope was discussed in that podcast-- as if hope were the holy grail of inspiration from Coates or anybody else for that matter. Coates has so much brilliance to offer-- about beauty, about sadness, about the craft of writing, about negotiating white-centering interviewers and audiences-- but Krista couldn't help but end on hope and how white audiences have received Coates. Hope isn't the end game, Coates insisted on multiple occasions.
That it kept becoming the end-game was exemplary of the white-centering interviewer techniques that Coates discussed earlier in the podcast, when he said it wasn't his job to help white people "catch up" to his content. Sadly, the audiences of this podcast missed a lot of his content because the interviewer centered hope in a particularly white way. Which isn't to say that hope is white; I'm just saying that there is a newfound market in hope coming from white people looking to people who've suffered for their solace.
White people who have enjoyed hopeful lives for the most part (like me) need to learn better how to dwell in negative emotions, rather than seek relief so quickly and superficially. Coates called it the "haunting" feelings that he wants to evoke in his craft. Take this beautiful moment when he showed, not just told, Krista that he wasn't going to let her extract hope from him: she asked Coates about joy, and he refused her desire for saccharin, and answered by describing how to evoke sadness in the written word. I wondered if she would push him on joy--"but you didn't answer my question"--but she let his answer be, to her credit, since, after all, it was his answer to her question about joy. I think she took his point.
Coates' answer to the teachers' question about hope was that he was never expecting his own teachers to give him hope. He wanted "enlightenment", "understanding," and "exposure" to help him understand what he was observing and experiencing in his own life. He described acquiring these tools as "freedom"; surely, freedom is the end-game, not hope. Hope is a kind of trap, as many people much smarter than I am have described, and which I write about elsewhere.
Since when do we demand hope from our teachers, our mentors, our parents, from anybody for that matter?
What does it say about our own privilege when we myopically focus on "hope" everywhere we go, with everyone we speak to?
What do we miss when our fetish for hope blocks out all the other rich, beautiful, sad, poignant, complex reality in front of us? That's where the real lessons are. Is our desire for hope blinding us from the work, from the feelings, from the relations, that will actually get us through this time?
I want to dwell in some negative affects, but just not those offered by listening to idiots in the news, so I'm going to keep listening to On Being, despite these critiques, which of course I'm bigging up to make my point.
To end on an up-note, for my dear reader's sake, I'll say I'm grateful for the new insights this particular show gave me about the gagging reflex I've been getting when I'm asked about hope.
