On Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., Hope Gets the Last WordAlterNet
By Cornel West
This essay appeared in "The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear," edited by Paul Rogat Loeb.
"He who has never despaired has no need to have lived." -Goethe
A specter of despair haunts late 20th-century America. The quality of our lives and the integrity of our souls are in jeopardy. Wealth inequality and class polarization are escalating – with ugly consequences for the most vulnerable among us…
This bleak portrait is accentuated in black America. The fragile black middle class fights a white backlash. The devastated black working class fears further underemployment or unemployment. And the besieged black poor struggle to survive.
Over 30 years after the cowardly murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., black America sits on the brink of collective disaster.
Yet most of our fellow citizens deny this black despair, downplay this black rage and blind themselves to the omens in our midst. So now, as in the past, we prisoners of hope in desperate times must try to speak our fallible truths, expose the vicious lies and bear our imperfect witness.
In 1946, when the great Eugene O'Neill's play The Iceman Cometh was produced, he said America was the greatest example of a country that exemplifies the Biblical question, "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world but lose his own soul?"
There's a sense in which [young people] today are in an anti-idealist mode and mood. They want to keep it real. And keeping it real means, in fact, understanding that the white supremacy you thought you could push back permeates every nook and cranny of this nation.
The country is in deep trouble. We've forgotten that a rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it. This is true at the personal level. But there's also a political version, which has to do with what you see when you get up in the morning and look in the mirror and ask yourself whether you are simply wasting your time on the planet or spending it in an enriching manner.
We need a moral prophetic minority of all colors who muster the courage to question the powers that be, the courage to be impatient with evil and patient with people, and the courage to fight for social justice. In many instances we will be stepping out on nothing, hoping to land on something. That's the history of black folks in the past and present, and of those of us who value history and struggle
To live is to wrestle with despair yet never to allow despair to have the last word.
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Adapted from Cornel West, Restoring Hope: Conversations on the Future of Black America (Beacon Press, 1997), and from West's comments in bell hooks and Cornel West, Breaking Bread (South End Press 1991). Cornel West's newest book is Democracy Matters (Penguin Books).
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