On Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., Hope Gets the Last Word
AlterNet
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.
~ ~ ~
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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