For Blacks in America, Hope Is Everything
Ismael Hernandez, “For Blacks in America, Hope Is Everything,” The Vital Center 2, no. 1 (Winter 2023): 16–24.
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When we create the context of liberty and systems that reflect the rational and volitional nature of every person, we discover a universe of possibilities and poverty ceases to be destiny. We understand that our race is not at the heart of our identity. We must help people experience this reality through simple and practical projects that position them, as individuals, as protagonists of their development, instead of remaining passive, like scenery in the drama of historic forces outside their control or tokens of pity or magnanimity. We are not drops in a wave. We are an ocean of possibilities.
Photo Credit: Sir Manuel on Unsplash.
Hope is everything. Aristotle once said that wonder lies at the beginning of philosophy, and it seems to me that similarly hope lies at the beginning of human flourishing. A people without hope languishes and then perishes. It is in the languishing that we can see the most desperate of all human conditions, as those who struggle cannot see the landscape of possibilities that lies ahead. Their subjectivity—their capacity to be a subject that acts rather than an object that is acted upon—is impaired by fear and by assumptions about their destiny that rob their future. They are deceived to think that hope is a punishment, a dangerous sentiment to be avoided so as to escape disappointment.
Thomas Aquinas makes it clear that hope is both an emotion or sensible attribute and a rational quality. Ultimately, hope as a rational quality is a theological virtue, because the object pursued is God himself. Union with the summum bonum is apprehended by the mind, which instructs our will to move us toward it. As a sensible attribute, however, hope experiences and desires a lower good through the mediation of senses. Proximately, hope is an emotion responding to the reality of sensible goods, which we recognize and stretch toward in their pursuit because they are authentically good. The theological virtue and the passion are distant from each other, but they share an affinity because both move us toward something worth searching for. The emotion paves the way, so to speak, to union with God but, in the here and now, motivates us to find the goods that surrounds us as we journey toward finality. How can a people live without that impulse? Hope is an assured expectation and trust that moves us to act in ways that align with our human existence. As such, hope is teleological, the substance of our purpose in life. Hope and purpose are sisters because hope is saying yes to purpose.
The very existence of Black people in this country is an icon of hope. Striving against overwhelming odds, they survived the alienating experience of being severed from their kin group by local enemies and sold to complete strangers who shipped them like cargo. Then came the dreadful middle passage and the beginning of new hardships. The journey stimulated the creation of a new identity in a foreign land. Being in bondage in Africa was followed by ignominious slavery in America, but the enslaved never abandoned their effort to reduce their marginality and resocialize within a new community. Fugitive slaves braved dangerous escape attempts, but the mass of slaves simply worked day in and day out while raising their families under terrible circumstances, while not even legally owning their own bodies or the fruits of their labor. They tried to learn and build in hopeful expectation, even when there was no good reason to expect a better life. Still, they hoped and envisioned the day when they not only would enjoy corporate status within America but even experience personal freedom—a privilege denied to both slaves and most non-slaves all over the world.[1] In his autobiography, Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington gives us a glimpse of the hope that fermented in the heart of every slave:
I had no schooling whatever while I was a slave, though I remember several occasions I went as far as the schoolhouse door with one of my young mistresses to carry her books. The picture of several dozen boys and girls in a schoolroom engaged in study made a deep impression upon me, and I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study in this way would be about the same as getting into paradise.
Having been deemed subhuman chattel, this people still strived and hoped. Their slavery was but the scenery in the drama of their perseverance. That scenery should never be given any protagonism, as if Blacks were objects of forces instead of subjects of meaning and purpose. Hope came from the strong inner core of their beings as they forged their American identity. That identity owes more to the shared spiritual and moral strength formed through their experience than to the degradations imposed on them. Although outwardly it seemed as if their worth derived from the practical utilitarian exigencies of being possessed by another, in reality it came from within, and that inner worth was indestructible.
THE SOURCE OF HOPE, AND ITS ABANDONMENT
For a people to have hope they must know what the good is. The good, after all, consists of those intelligible, right, and desirable qualities we perceive in things. The good must be knowable and reachable, and the habit of pursuing it is called virtue. Virtue is a difficult, arduous apprenticeship because often our lower inclinations fight against the dictates of reason. Yet, it is possible to reach it. Just imagine how desperate human existence would be if we could perceive these necessary qualities only as empty abstractions. Despair would constitute the very essence of our existence as we long and pursue the unattainable. The gods must be cruel in giving us the sensible capacity of knowing that these desirable qualities exist but forever denying our access to them.
The passion of hope is simply the human inclination toward the pursuit of the goods of this world as we journey into eternity. This passion exists because it is connected to certain truths about the human constitution. The historic conception of human nature tied an “ought” to the reality of an “is.” There is a law written in the heart of human nature—a law that, as the fifth-century presbyter Lucidus described it, is “the first grace of God” (See in this regard, Russell Hittinger’s The First Grace: “The natural law is said to be ‘the first grace of God’ [per primam Dei gratiam] before the coming of Christ [in adventum Christi]).” In pursuing these goods we can develop habits of action that perfect the nature of human beings. The danger of the skepticism that now informs our body politic is its distrust of the very existence of purpose built into the fabric of human nature—because it assumes that there is no human nature. There seem to be only ideas in our minds, which threaten to dissolve the good within empty words and rationalizations about power struggles expressed in narrative discourse. This type of discourse provides a structured conception of anecdote; that is, it is a type of fiction.[2] In this view, humans produce meaning by way of anecdote, which is prior in the mind and not in the nature of things. We discover nothing about ourselves, we create everything; we invent meaning and purpose and impose it via power. Now, if there is not a knowable and objective world of values and virtues, how can the contemplation and pursuit of goods such as justice, beauty, and goodness be possible? Can we have authentic hope? If ought cannot be derived from is, then what is the basis for human action, right and wrong, legal systems, or virtuous living? In the hands of a skeptical culture, hope dies, while the hordes sing revolutionary songs and praise the death of the old order where reason was not merely the slave of our passions.
Booker T. Washington in 1905. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
In the history of Western thought, it was the nominalist conceptions of Thomas Hobbes that rendered human reason utterly incapable of knowing universals. In his hands, reason became merely an instrument to arbitrarily assign meaning to words. These words bear no necessary relationship with reality. They introduce order into the chaos of purposeless existence. Men are driven by passions—raw, destructive, selfish, and wicked—and our destiny is to live a life that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In Hobbes’s De Homine, as Russell Hittinger points out, Hobbes presents men in architectonic fashion; men are reduced to particles of accumulated matter, mere modes of material quantity without a telos or end. A human being is a “stimulus-response mechanism that endeavors to augment its power.” In the status naturalis the human condition is one of “war of every man against every man” because existence is little more than a struggle for power. That status needs to be superseded by a covenant, a status civilis, where men look to the political sovereign as the savior of their condition, investing him with power by depriving themselves of freedom.
The assault on the Aristotelian and Thomistic conceptions of human nature continued with thinkers like David Hume and Jeremy Bentham. Later, a climax was reached with Immanuel Kant, from whom the German idealism of Johann Fichte, F. W. Schelling, and its most reputed figure, G. W. F. Hegel, sprang. The pedigree of skepticism could not be complete without Nietzsche and his “will to power.” As philosopher Samuel Gregg explains, “Nietzsche believed that man had to recreate his own nature, to become the one who realizes that if there is no truth, the only thing left to do is act.” From this philosophical tradition, Karl Marx emerges to continue the enterprise.
Since then, we have descended into a neo-Marxist and postmodernist erasure of hope by way of radical claims about what it means to be human. Anthropology remains at the heart of all our controversies. Human goods, if they exist, we are told, do not derive from inherent facts about human nature. All goods are socially construed because there is no given human nature. Everything is given to us by the social imposition of a law that, similar to Hobbes’s nominalism, dictates meaning, purpose, and goodness. We are in a war of one against the other, because war is all there is in the pursuit of power. Human beings do not think or feel, nor is reason “the sovereign architect of the order of knowledge,” as Kant put it (See Rommen, The Natural Law, 78). Humans are beings only because we assign that meaningless label to the facticity of purposeless matter.
Absent such a thing as nature itself,[3] there is no human nature and, of course, no summum bonum. Absent human nature, there are no objective goods to pursue, human or otherwise. In the absence of goods, there is no hope. Absent hope, there is no impetus for habits to pursue its objects—that is, there is no virtue. It follows that theories and visions recognizing power as the key element in social, political, cultural, and racial interaction are unable to offer hope to a people whose very social identity was built by hope. They cannot assist us in the creation of a flourishing environment where there is a strong protection for the dignity of human beings. The fate of Black Americans and of all human beings lies in the dictates of the powerful, and as such, we remain within the slavery system’s paradigm. Maybe today those with power deign to recognize our dignity, maybe tomorrow they rescind it. Modern neo-Marxist theories sprung from more ancient errors can only offer antagonism as the instrument to acquire power in a journey undertaken by beings who are no more than curious accumulations of atoms destined for nothingness. Hope is reduced to an insubstantial word that gives us a good feeling.
As we see, the death of hope has a history. That history left crumbs in a trail of the deconstruction of the most basic tenets of human dignity, one that differs little from the racist ideologies that perpetrated some of the most injurious attacks on Black dignity. The main political, cultural, and intellectual patterns of thought and action in the West today are patterns of deconstruction. Our epistemology is being altered and with it the patterns of thought that seek to classify and explain entities. This transformation thus leads to a change in our ontology. Claims about the nature of being and existence are altered and with them claims about the most important object of inquiry: man himself. We seem to no longer know what reality is nor what the human person is in the context of existence. Inevitably, our praxis is changing, both legally and culturally. Due to this shattering activity, we can barely recognize ourselves.
What is the basis for this deconstruction? I believe that it is an amalgamation of various schools of thought, in tension with each other but all intent on bringing about a brave new world through the exorcism of wishful thinking. Both structuralist and post-structuralist theories are in the recipe, vying for power over our collective consciousness. On the one hand we have the structuralist Hegelian understanding of being and social change via its Marxist rendition. For Hegel, the history of social change was the history of the evolution of the Geist, that is, a process of negation and incorporation of ideas to produce a synthesis that dominates an era. The dominant ideas of a time are the Zeitgeist of that period. Hegel believed that these changes had a logical pattern, because within the dominant ideas of a time there were necessary contradictions and challenges that eventually moved into tension and transformation. Hegel called the process of building a new paradigm of ideas that contains both the previous dominant ideas and their negation, sublation. A new set of ideas emerges, victorious but containing all previous ideas within it. There is a logical pattern at play as humanity grows in knowledge.
Karl Marx took Hegel’s basic structure and determined that what is at the heart of social change is not the ideas of a time but the dominant patterns of economic production. These dominant patterns benefited a given social class that in logical and scientific evolution contained within itself the seed of discord. Just as the Geist gave rise to a new set of ideas for Hegel, for Marx the dominant class gave rise to an antagonistic class following a logical and scientific necessity. The key for society to move forward was power, acquired through radical and violent change, through revolution. Moreover, both the Hegelian and the Marxist systems saw the various cultural, political, linguistic, and economic forces within an era as emanations or epiphenomena of a basic element at the base of social reality. In Hegel, this irreducible element was the Geist, and in Marx it was social class.
Of all challenges to the Western tradition of thought, the most successful in practical terms was the Marxist. But something happened to Marxism in the course of time. After the death of Marx, as fundamental Marxist predictions failed to come to fruition, a number of alternative explanations for these failures contended with one another for power.[4] Meanwhile, the revolutionary activism of Marxism brought about great upheaval in all of Europe, culminating in the Communist takeover of Russia. Now we had more than theories of social change—there was actual change.
MARXISM IN BLACK AMERICA
In Black America, orthodox Marxism came to dominate minor sectors of the Black intellectual class early on, with W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson serving as prime examples.[5] The excesses of Leninism and later Stalinism in Russia made it necessary to explain not only Marx but the Soviet debacle itself. In the United States, the “New Left” emerged after the death of Stalin in 1953 and constituted a revival of hopes for a metamorphosis of socialism. Marxists fantasized that at last the solution to the conundrum of the mixture of socialist economics with a totalitarian state was at hand. The Promethean project of a new reign of justice was finally possible. The cause of Blacks became the most important axis of that aspiration, because it embodied the most severe aspects of capitalist oppression. Eventually, a challenge to the more reformist approach of Dr. Martin Luther King emerged within the Civil Rights Movement—a development that was informed by the ideas of the New Left.[6] Although not all challenges to King’s leadership were Marx-inspired, the Marxist type seems to have eventually dominated this alternative movement.[7] Anti-Americanism and classic Marxist theory continued to inform this transformation of the movement, but elements of neo-Marxist thought were present and moving fast. Race began to be conceived not as an epiphenomenon of class but as a basic reality of identity, irreducible to any other element. Racial identity rather than class consciousness became the focus. “Whiteness” became the principal scourge of humanity. The key to solving the problem of capitalist oppression was to “abolish the white race.”
Some new theories emerging within Marxism seem to propose a return to a more Hegelian system. In a twist, there is now a desire to return to the younger Marx, the more Hegelian Marx, to induce an epistemic revolution. This recovery of a more primitive Hegelianism does not conclude with the postmodern erasure of identity or its elitist and academic attitude of nihilistic despair at the state of existence, which envisions no political solution. The postmodern critique has been infused with a tool for action, a new praxis, with identity as the weapon. Identity, now collectivized and expanded into multiple axes, serves as the engine for social action under a new designation: “social justice.” As power and knowledge determine social reality, activism is the new sacrament conveying the indelible mark of authentic revolutionary zeal. The new “liberationist paradigm” is being internalized within the whole culture. Its task of separating identity from biology remains, but identity is now seen as formed against the backdrop of oppressive social constructs such as knowledge, language, and power, all of them exploited by the powerful.
The ideas of an era as expressed in its culture are seen now as essential to bringing about the revolution, and these various axes are not reducible to class. Each of them is grounded at the base of social reality within a maze of oppressive silos. Among the movements advocating these new theories we find the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, Gramscian theories commonly known as cultural Marxism, and what we can loosely call the “Social Justice” movement. A thousand cuts into the bleeding body of Western civilization will cause its death.
What remains as the key tying thread in this revolutionary enterprise is the will to power. Gone is any totalizing metanarrative that explains change, such as Marx’s metanarrative of class conflict. Gone is the certainty that there is a coherent or even scientific logic to social change. Among the many silos of the revolution, a post-structuralist mood has increasingly taken hold over the whole enterprise of revolution. A will to power is now expressed in a refusal to be governed even by the nature of reality. Everything we once took for granted is to be challenged because all of it is oppressive. Objective reality, traditional morality, morality itself, and even the very understanding of being are social constructs that create social law imposed by power.
What is more radical, and frightening, is that the changes bringing about a new phase in history—or to use Foucault’s terminology, a new episteme—are random. There is no logical, transformative structure to the breaks between one epoch and another. There are no rules governing revolutionary phases, as there were in orthodox Marxism. An epistemology of random discontinuity is supreme. The reign of unpredictability and radical and maddening disjunction is here. All that matters is the devastating hurricane of change and the radical view of the human person’s identity described ideologically. Blackness becomes a raw decree from those in power, the idolatry of ideology consuming all and erasing or adding melanin at will. Grand theory necessitates an order in the mind, a rational assessment of processes; the new departure requires only what Nietzsche identified as key to social existence: the will to power. Critical theory applied to the question of race is an example of the will to power that rejects the need for a coherent metanarrative with logical sequence. Revolution does not need coherence, it needs activism. As Carl Trueman writes, “All previous metanarratives have, for good or ill, attempted to provide the world with stability, a set of categories by which cultures can operate.” The new radicalisms reject the need for an epistemology that is seen as part of the very system whose eradication is sought. As Noelle Mering tells us, “The point is to destabilize, fragment, and eradicate hierarchy, history, meaning, and fundamental human identity.”
Black feminist thought generated the most radical notions of neo-Marxism now informing our notions of race. Black feminists began to analyze the roles of class, sex, and race as distinct forms of oppression. Early on, feminists had analogized sexism and racism. In 1904, Mary Church Terrell emphasized that in the double jeopardy of sex and race, Black women had the lower hand because they were women: “Not only are colored women […] handicapped on account of their sex, but they are almost everywhere baffled and mocked because of their race. Not only because they are women but because they are colored women” (Quoted in Deborah King’s “Multiple Jeopardy Multiple Consciousnesses,” 265). Reflecting the longstanding competition for the lowest position in the paradigm of oppression, by 1988 Black feminist Deborah King observed, “Still others have suggested that heterosexism or homophobia represent another significant oppression and should be included as a third or perhaps fourth jeopardy.” Her words witnessed the emergence of additional claims of similar oppressed axis status that now number in the dozens.
The claim for special status for blackness in the kaleidoscope of oppression is based on the belief that the equations of oppression are not additions, as if each axis is subsumed identically. Instead, in the interdependence of multiple axes there might be a hierarchy. Of such importance is race that Black women were seen as marginalized not only within the larger culture but also within the feminist movement itself. Today, many claim identities in the gender realm that conflict with their genetic sex, but the notion that similar claims could be made against racial determinants remains inconceivable.
So radical is this system of multiple axes of oppression where race appears to remain as primary in a maze of identities that only Blacks can explain the significance of their oppression. And, as race is an ideological construct, Blacks are only those whose consciousness aligns with the progressive political and racial zeitgeist, giving them an epistemically privileged position. Objectivity in the analysis of social reality is merely the academic expression of oppression by a system informed by Whiteness through a “Euro-centric-Masculinist knowledge validation process.” This process determines everything with one aim in mind: the maintenance of the balance of power. Liberation only comes by rejecting the mirage of objectivity and acknowledging the epistemic advantage of members of the oppressed group, whose perspective cannot be questioned without unjustly injuring them. The epistemology of scientific research, called positivist by radical feminists, is challenged because it requires distance between the inquirer and the subject of inquiry. Patricia Hill Collins rejects the scientific method because it “asks African American women to objectify themselves, devalue their emotional life, displace their motivations for further knowledge about Black Women, and confront in an adversarial relationship, those who have more social, economic and professional power than they.” In other words, what Black feminists proposed and later has been extended to the entire spectrum of social science including questions of class, gender, and race, is adherence to collectivist and unfalsifiable ideological epistemology.
“A return to the person—unique and unrepeatable, with the imago Dei imprinted in our being—is the critical step away from the nightmarish idealism of radicalism and all its monsters.”
A RETURN TO THE PERSON
Abandoning the totalistic poison of neo-Marxism will help us fight the politics of despair and bring hope to our people. A return to the person—unique and unrepeatable, with the imago Dei imprinted in our being—is the critical step away from the nightmarish idealism of radicalism and all its monsters. I abandoned these monsters long ago, as I journeyed from my island of Puerto Rico to southern Mississippi. I was a young, Black, communist kid who hated America, landing in Dixie! Here, over time, I was confronted with new ideas and a new experience. A new anthropological lens allowed me to realize that I was not merely a drop in the ocean, whose dignity existed strictly within the wave of revolution. I was instead a subject whose dignity was intrinsic and not determined by being a specimen of a group. That experiential encounter with liberty is the antidote against radicalism. Although my new home was an imperfect country by any measure—all societies are—I discovered that I was not a cog, a replaceable component part in a faceless mass of humanity. I am a free, volitional, and rational being who is capable of self-determination and irreducible to a mere component. Our task in Black America is to help people discover the grandeur of their personal dignity, one that inheres in them, not one bestowed on them by external agents. When we create a context for our uniqueness to express itself, an amazing and undirected process of improvement begins.
Liberty as the sum of all our freedoms can come only from newly reaffirming an old anthropology that recognizes our capacity to scrape into the dirt of the ground and, through the sweat of our brow and the insights of our minds, create value for ourselves and for others. When we create the context of liberty and systems that reflect the rational and volitional nature of every person, we discover a universe of possibilities and poverty ceases to be destiny. The poor are no longer merely mouths to be fed, bodies to be clothed, and problems to be solved. We also understand that our race is not at the heart of our identity. Every small step opens up a tiny new realm for the possibility of truly autonomous action. We must believe this, proclaim it boldly, and teach it widely. Even more importantly, we must help people experience this reality through simple and practical projects that position them, as individuals, as protagonists of their development, instead of remaining passive, like scenery in the drama of historic forces outside their control or tokens of pity or magnanimity. We are not drops in a wave. We are an ocean of possibilities.
ENDNOTES
[1] As Orlando Patterson shows, the idea of personal freedom as a value was envisioned by many in the non-Western world but became an institutional value only in the West. The condition of belonging, participating, and being protected by society was a universal aspiration of slaves attempting resocialization within the master’s community all over the world, but personal independence and freedom was never realized institutionally. Yet, in America, the slave observed from afar the exercise of personal freedom as a dim possibility, harboring hope for it. Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1991).
[2] Narration is the accurate exposition of actual events, and narrative is the exposition of things as though they happened. Narratives prefer the use of anecdote to showcase a central theme or meta-narrative. Anecdote is preferred by adherents of postmodern and critical theory because objectivity, in their view, is a phantom. The “truth” that must become central to social interaction is the story of the oppressed, told through their experience and interpretation. A good example of the use of narrative discourse at the service of an ideology is Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
[3] A problem with the concept of nature is its multiple overlapping meanings. What is often denied in modern philosophy is the idea that things have a basic essence, namely, the qualities that make a thing what it is. These qualities inhere in the thing itself and point toward a purpose. For a summary of the five meanings of nature, see John Habgood, The Concept of Nature (London: Darton, Longman, & Todd, 2002), part 1.
[4] Instead of the increased pauperization of the proletariat caused by the internal alienating forces of capitalism, Europe began to experience the emergence of a middle class. Another set of questions in revisionism surrounded the question of tactics and the relationship between the revolutionary class and the bourgeoisie. Lenin was involved in both aspects of revisionism by proposing the theory of imperialism as the final stage of capitalism to explain the development of a European middle class and by proposing the theory of the united front tactic on the question of alliances with the bourgeoise class.
[5] Du Bois’s support for Marxism created problems with the NAACP leadership, and he left the organization 1948. He ran as the Progressive Party’s candidate for Senate in 1950 and eventually became known for his defense of Joseph Stalin’s regime. In 1961 Du Bois officially joined the American Communist Party before leaving the country to live in Ghana. Robeson similarly defended Stalin. See James Kirchick, “Paul Robeson Was an Unrepentant Stalinist. Rutgers Should Acknowledge That,” Washington Post, February 19, 2019.
[6] In addition to these early Marxists, there were other prominent Marxists such as Lucy Parsons, James W. Ford, Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, and Huey Newton. Movements such as the Communist Party USA, the Black Panther Party, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers were important out-lets for Black revolutionaries.
[7] Malcolm X’s approach is a good example of a non-socialist alternative to that of King. As James H. Cone puts it, “Although Malcolm was open to learn from anyone who was concerned about liberation of humanity from oppression, he was primarily a black revolutionary and not a Marxist revolutionary.” James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 184–85.
An abbreviated version of this essay appears in a forthcoming collection of essays to be published by the Woodson Center. The author is grateful for the permission to publish the longer form here.
