Hope for Freedom’s America

My one word to define 2017

I don’t make resolutions. When asked what my New Year’s resolutions are, I often say “Stop making New Year’s resolutions.”

What I have always done instead is choose a single word to study, explore, and perhaps– though not in the way of a resolution– live by.

The year after my twins were born, the word was “patience.” I read various writers’ and scholars’ takes on what patience meant to them, how they used it. From Margaret Atwood to Neil Gaiman. I wondered what various aspects are there to patience. Is patience simply waiting? Or can it be hoping, wishing, praying?

In some languages, I learned, waiting and wishing are the same word.

I usually let the year’s word emerge from the fog of my thoughts and experiences throughout the year. Sometime around late autumn, the word coalesces as the weather grows colder and I turn inward. My word for 2015 was chosen by someone else, suddenly, and at the last minute.

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Hope

It was the beginning of December 2014 when Ta-Nehisi Coates published an essay about white supremacy that made me cringe.

I’m a pretty big fan of Coates, and even when I disagree with him, I respect his argument. So when he wrote Hope and the Historian on Dec. 10, 2015, I read it thinking “I’m going to love this.”

At first, I did.

“The point here isn’t that white supremacy won’t ever diminish, nor that it won’t ever change form. The point is that it will always be with us in some form, and the best one can reasonably hope for is that it will shrink in impact.”

I agree with this, and I have written similar things myself. What troubled me was the conclusion he reached:

“…I think that a writer wedded to ‘hope’ is ultimately divorced from ‘truth.’ Two creeds can’t occupy the same place at the same time. If your writing must be hopeful, then there’s only room for the kind of evidence which verifies your premise.”

That, I thought, is patently absurd.

It is an odd coincidence that on the exact same date I published an essay in Al Jazeera from the precise perspective that Coates challenged. My essay discussing the racist rhetoric of the early Republican campaign was one in which I specifically meant to combine hope and truth in the same space. I wrote:

“…there’s very little the Democrats can do to win… As grim as this scenario sounds, it actually gives me some hope. It seems racism is on the rise. But today, the black community is mobilized in a way not seen since — or even during — the Civil Rights Movement.”

Hope, as evidenced by Black protests throughout the country and the amazingly effective Black use of social media, was, I thought, occupying the same space as the election of a white supremacist, a predicted truth that I wish I’d been wrong about. I see no exclusivity in that.

In fact, to say that hope and truth cannot occupy the same space seems to devalue much of the Black experience in America.

It wasn’t truth alone that made our enslaved ancestors fight and survive, it was the hope that it was a good fight. It was hope that a better day was coming. So it seemed wrong to suggest that the two creeds can’t occupy the same space. In fact, it I think they must, because a crushing truth without any hope is the foundation of despair. For centuries, Black people have done nothing if not fought despair.

Hope and Darkness

That was were I stood at the beginning of last year. Back then, I saw the word “hope” not as exclusive of “truth,” but as an inherent part of it. Hope was absolutely necessary.

One year hence, the word “hope” feels almost flat to me.

These days, as I put my children to bed at night, I am haunted by Coates’ statement that writers like me are “committing [ourselves] to the ahistorical, to the mythical, to the hagiography of humanity itself.” I don’t want to agree with Coates on this, but as I leave my children in their beds I can’t help but see my turning out their bedroom light as a metaphor.

The skies are darkening in America.

At least they are for those of us who are not wealthy white Christians or who don’t believe that we should create a white Christian corporate state. It feels as though there is a storm coming, and while many of us carry a smile in our daily lives, many of us already feel the sleet on our face. I, for one, am starting to believe Coates was right. For some Americans, the truth of our current government seems to leave little room for hope to occupy the same space.

Hope in Checks and Balances

Many others have detailed the incoming government’s goals and principles, and I needn’t rehash those here except to repeat that despite an overwhelming majority [http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/310518-spicer-cuomo-get-heated-over-trumps-overwhelming-win] of our electorate voting for an exceptionally qualified– if neoliberal– candidate, our White House now seems little more than an openly White Supremacist kleptocratic extension of the Putin oil regime. Even before our Electoral College decision, our new leader has been populating the highest offices of government as if cabinet positions were designed to fundamentally cripple the offices they lead.

Of course, it may not be that bad. As some have suggested, we have a 300 year old document that builds in checks and balances to ensure a stable democracy.

The reality is our “checks and balances” are based upon two branches of government being willing to reign in any one that tries to go rogue. Such willingness seems all but gone when one branch of our government, because it holds a grudge against another, effectively cripples the only one remaining to provide balance.

The childish behavior that left an empty Supreme Court seat suggests that “checks and balances,” if a hope at all, is at best a distant one.

And such childishness is bipartisan. As I and others have said before, the road to authoritarianism is one paved by both parties, and has been under construction since at least the civil war, when those checks and balances allowed Abraham Lincoln to suspend habeas corpus. Both parties have increased the Executive branch’s power, making Congress and the Supreme Court that much more important.

In his interview in The New Yorker, President Obama said the following

“…if I proposed something that was literally word for word in the Republican Party platform, it would be immediately opposed by eighty to ninety per cent of the Republican voters.”

While that reality has hamstrung a Democratic president with a majority Republican Congress, the reverse is also true. What balance would there be from a legislative branch that will by all accounts bend their knee to the executive as a general to an emperor? What balance will there be when our judicial branch– the only one left to check and balance– is likely to be filled by a similar sycophantic milieu?

When all branches of our government are playing by the same neo-fascist rule book, where is the hope that there will be balance?

Hope and The Rule Of Law

The hope, some suggest, is that we live in a society governed by rule of law. Many have argued that our Supreme Court is non-partisan and impartial, that they will follow the law, not political whim. If this were the case, our Republican controlled Congress would not have blocked an appointee of a Democratic president specifically in the hopes of allowing a Republican president to choose one.

Truth and hope certainly cannot occupy the same space if rule of law is fickle. The Supreme Court is tasked with interpreting the law, not judging its morality– this is something Dred Scott learned so long ago. If the executive and legislative branches are equally xenophobic, those laws can be as draconian as anything we’ve ever seen. And as we know by the increasingly unbalanced incarceration rates since The War on Drugs began, even the interpretation of those laws can be both suspect and drastically different for different demographic groups.

From Black incarceration to Japanese internment, we’ve seen what US Rule of Law can mean when racism and xenophobia is couched in terms of “safety.”

Already we see Sen. Doug Ericksen of Washington introducing a bill that would create a new crime of “economic terrorism,” which is nothing more than a way to criminalize our citizen right to protest. Trump himself has already begun to normalize the idea that citizenship can be revoked.

Would it take many legal nudges to crush our dissent? To allow the legal imprisonment of peaceful protesters at Standing Rock, or of Black Lives Matter activists? Sheriff David Clarke has already made the bizarre suggestion that the BLM movement will “join forces with ISIS,” thus equating them with terrorists, while also suggesting that we suspend habeas corpus. Meanwhile, the US court system effectively recused itself from having a say in the killing of a US Citizen even under Obama. What legal protections will dissenters have under an authoritarian– and vindictive– president?

Hope and Resistance

All of this brings me back to that word: hope. Where is hope when America, that pillar of freedom and democracy, is openly discussing bans on Muslims, stripping citizenship, or starting state-run media organizations?

Listening to our new leaders, I have few arguments against Coates’ assertion that truth and hope cannot occupy the same space.

The laws that protect us, and that allow dissent, will be fickle if all branches of government bow to an authoritarian ruler. Our freedom of privacy is already all but gone and our freedom of dissent is already in question. As Imani Gandy so succinctly puts it “If you still think [this is] alarmist, maybe you haven’t been paying attention”

Yet America itself is not under threat.

America will remain. It is what we hold as American that is in grave doubt.

There is no real guarantee that our beloved ideals of freedom and equality be always an American ideal. There is no guarantee that we will, as Langston Hughes pleaded, let America be America again.

A fascist, authoritarian America will still be “America,” it will just not be our America. It will not be Freedom’s America.

Freedom’s America desperately needs truth and hope to occupy the same space, and while it’s easy to lose hope, it’s important that we do not.

While editing this essay yesterday, I read a essay by Alex Steffen called “The Politics of Optimism” and while he uses optimism/cynicism instead of hope/despair, the point he makes is similar and I think one we need to remember: We need optimism. We need hope.

Cynicism does help authoritarianism. It helped keep people away from the poles (along with voter restrictions), but it also helps us stop fighting. We need to fight authoritarianism. We need to fight for Freedom’s America, and to fight, we need the hope that it’s a good fight. We need to remember that while truth without hope is despair, truth coupled with hope is resistance.

Right now, Freedom’s America needs a resistance.

My word for 2017 is another kind of hope

This is the first year that my word for the year is the same as last year. My word is still hope, but it’s not the same kind of hope I used to have.

I hope that Donald Trump won’t be the authoritarian leader he seems to be. I hope that we will have an America where freedom and equality remain our core values.

But right now, I can’t look at our current truth with too much of that hope, because it seems to be proven wrong with every statement by the president-elect, with every one of his cabinet appointments.

To have such a simple hope now seems foolish, little more than Coates’ “hagiography of humanity.”

Now I have a darker hope. The hope of resistance. My hope is in the good fight for Freedom’s America.

I will not be one of those “writers who commit themselves to only writing hopeful things.” Still, hope must be a part of my truth. Because America needs a truth that is bolstered by hope.

America needs a strong resistance. A resistance against racism, against misogyny, against xenophobia and neo-fascist ideals. America needs us all to resist fear and hate.

Freedom’s America needs us to demand that our leaders, every one of them, remember her greatest truth: That what has always made America great is both our diversity and our dissent.