A public bathroom was not the best place to engage one of my writing heroes in meaningful conversation. Of course, it was not a completely random meeting—I had purchased a ticket to hear him speak at the event. And, to be fair, I recognised him in the bathroom but waited outside to say hi and express my appreciation of his work, even as someone from a different culture and the other side of the world.
I first read the writing of Ta-Nehisi Coates when Between the World and Me was winning all its awards and critical acclaim, then went back to “The Case for Reparations”—his landmark 2014 essay in The Atlantic—as required reading for a graduate class in justice studies. Others of his books have since made their way onto my reading list—and now I had the brief opportunity to say thank you.
But what I really wanted to ask him about was his dismissal of hope, his prioritisation of struggle and his assertion that “resistance must be its own reward, since resistance, at least within the life span of the resistors, almost always fails.”1 Of course, historically, it is hard to argue against his sentiment. In concluding his How To Be Antiracist, it seems Ibram Kendi would agree: “There is nothing I see in our world today, in our history, giving me hope that one day antiracists will win the fight.”2
It is difficult to grow and sustain hope. More simply, it is hard to hope. Each headline, each murder, each injustice, each outrage, each tweet, each slight or shrug adds to a growing sense of futility and the temptation to despair. Too often, reality contradicts the possibility of hope.
And, too often, hope has been used as an excuse. Rather than addressing and working to overcome the injustice and racism in the world around us—so the argument goes—hope promotes passivity and urges its adherents to focus their efforts and attentions on some kind of other realm or possible afterlife. Like any cliché, there is a truth behind it. The hope offered by faith has been used as “the opium of the people”—to borrow Karl Marx’s infamous line—by those who have held power in various cultures and societies.
But, at times, a milquetoast hope has also been embraced by the oppressed people themselves who have used the consolations offered by religion as a way of shrugging their shoulders and grimly making the best of the status quo. Faced with the inevitabilities of life, death and all the injustices and sorrows in between, hope has been used to normalize tragedy, explain the inexcusable and cultivate complicity with injustice. And if this is all there is to hope, those who choose hope are rightful objects of criticism and even pity.
But using faith and hope in this way is difficult to maintain. The content of this hope undermines its abuse. This is why often in history the religion of the oppressor has sown the seeds of liberation and renewed the possibilities of hope, even when brandished in the hand of injustice: “Christianity also is first and foremost a theodicy, a triumphant account of good over evil. The intellectual life of the African slaves in the United States—like that of all oppressed peoples—consisted primarily of reckoning with the dominant form of evil in their lives. The Christian emphasis on against-the-evidence hope for triumph over evil struck deep among many of them.”3 The substance of such hope contradicts unjust reality.
So as we confront a world torn by injustice and racism, with a tragic history and a rising tide of anger and despair, we need to remember the content of that hope and a particular picture offered by the visions of Revelation that offers an alternative perspective. Describing a group of people who have emerged from our troubled world, Revelation 7 details the different people groups who are represented equally and equitably (see verses 5–8), together comprising “a vast crowd, too great to count, from every nation and tribe and people and language, standing in front of the throne and before the Lamb” (Revelation 7:9, NLT). In a later vision, this crowd of humanity sings together a song of praise and victory, literally creating harmony in their God-created and God-honouring diversity (see Revelation 14:1–3).
We must not allow the poetic nature of this language to dull the revolutionary force of what it describes. According to the Bible, this is the future of humanity—the pinnacle of our collective human endeavours. And the reality of the human family reconstituted in the presence of God is not merely a future fantasy; it is a beam of light shining into our present darkness. It is a call to live and work today, oriented toward this alternative vision of what it means to be human. It is a hope that can never be a pacifier or an excuse.
Assured by these promises of the future, we must work to resist the temptation to despair, recognizing that our hope is a unique attribute for living as the people of God, confronting injustice and overcoming evil in our world: “Hopelessness is the enemy of justice. When you are fighting for justice you are fighting against hopelessness. Injustice prevails where hopelessness persists. So you have to see hopelessness as a kind of toxin that will kill your ability to make a difference. And the truth is, you’re either hopeful working toward justice, or you’re the problem. There’s nothing in between. You can’t be neutral.”4
An overused expression in justice conversations is the call for a leader, commentator or other contributor to ensure they will be counted as “on the right side of history.” It is often a noble but hollow expression. From their perspective of history, writers such as Coates and Kendi are correct: justice is not inevitable, racism is not predestined to fade, oppression will not go out of business. Instead, they urge us to rejoin their struggle—and to that we bring our vision of an alternative future to which we can invite them and many more to stand “on the right side of the future.”
While we yet hear only hopeful echoes of those harmonious songs of praise and victory envisioned in Revelation, we join another chorus of psalmists, prophets and the oppressed across the millennia, singing and crying out, “How long?” Injustice and racism will be overthrown. Somehow their evils will be undone and their wounds will be healed. In the victorious resurrection of Jesus, they are already defeated. The question is no longer if, but when. And when we ask again, “How long?” we testify to the impermanence of injustice, and so sound again the call to listen and to speak, to act and to march, to shout and to vote, to love and to hope.
Of course, I couldn’t share all of that in my brief conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates—but my greater task is to listen and to hear his experiences, insights, anger and struggle, for which I was privileged to have the opportunity to say thank-you.
- Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, One World, 2017, page 289.
- Ibram X Kendi, How To Be Antiracist, One World, 2019, page 238.
- Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance! (20th Anniversary Edition), Westminster John Knox Press, 2002, page 35.
- Bryan Stevenson in Sherrilyn Ifill, Loretta Lynch, Bryan Stevenson and Anthony C Thompson, A Perilous Path: Talking Race, Inequality, and the Law, The New Press, 2018, page 99.