SUSPENDED FUTURITY DA. Topical imagination is psychically draining on black time.

IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, significant racial inequalities and anti-black violence continue to be rampant in the United States. Decades, even centuries, of political and legal struggle have deco lisle to change that fact. This chapter will argue that black Americans need new tactics and strategies for responding to the white class privilege and white supremacy that fundamentally structure the country.' They need to increase the number and type of tools in their racial justice toolkit, expanding beyond liberal faith in civil rights and white people's good intentions to cooperate with racial change. The political and legal work that black and other people of color (along with some white people) have done to eliminate antiblack racism isn't working. Pragmatists in particular need to be able to face up to that fact given that we value the practical work that ideas, concepts, and truths can do. Why then, as Calvin Warren pragmatically asks in the epigraph above, would we expect people fighting racism to keep doing the same thing? Why would anyone hope that the same failed actions and strategies would mm out any differentia the future? This kind of hope can function as a cruel optimism that "works" by keeping black people focused on the very thing that undercuts their flourishing (Warren 2015, 221).

In line with Warren's concerns, I argue that black America' hope that political struggle can achieve racial justice tends to be a harmed emotion they should avoid. I maim my case in a pragmatist spirit that opposes Comet West's influential argument for black hope In contrast to West, I contend that pragmatists and others concerned about racial injustice would do better to draw on Derrick Bell's racial realism and Warren's blank nihilism to develop alternative strategies for addressing antiblack racism In related ways, Bell and Warren urge their readers to reckon with the permanence of racism and to give up hope that additional political struggle will eliminate it. After exploring their complementary accounts, I augment them with concrete evidence from the health sciences that black hope can be physically harmful to black people, weathering their bodies nod damaging their psychosomatic health such that they are less able to withstand the inequities of anti-black racism. I conclude by arguing for the advantages of reading Bell's and Warren's claims about the permanence of racism pragmatically, that is, by assessing the truth of their claims via their effects. The result is the working hypothesis that black people will have a much greater chance of developing new practices, habits, and strategies of flourishing in an anti-black world if they no longer hope that political struggle will eliminate racism.

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The United States continues to struggle with deeply ingrained racial inequalities and wildly flagrant acts of racialized injustice even after abolishing its Jim Crow laws in the 1960s. From 2014 to 2016, for example, the United States was rocked by news of the violent deaths of unarmed black people at the hands of white police officers: Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Eric Garner in New York; Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio; Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina; and the list could go on. (For analysis, see Zack 2015.) Their deaths were soon followed by the fatal shooting of nine black people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, by the alleged white supremacist Dylan Roof; the burning of several prominent black churches in the South as a possible backlash to calls for South Carolina to stop flying the Confederate flag; and the police shooting of Keith Scott in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The shocking violence against black Americans has occurred against a backdrop of chronic and growing racial inequality that the elimination of legal segregation has done little to address. Examples include the fact that in 2012, African American women made 64 cents for every dollar that a non-Hispanic white man made (Kerby 2013). Racial disparities in health also exist, for example in disproportionately higher rates of coronary artery disease, diabetes, stroke, HIV/AIDS, and infant mortality for African Americans (Smedley et al., no date). As of 2005, African Americans were incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of white people (Mauer and King 2007). Black families regularly are the targets of child welfare services that shift black children into foster homes, a process that fuels the schoolto-prison pipeline since children in foster homes are significantly more likely to go to prison than children who remain with their parents/families (Roberts 2002). A racialized aesthetics continues to benefit white people and penalize people of color: white beauty standards are normative, especially for women, positioning dark-skinned and black women as “the beauty don’ts” in contrast to white women as “the beauty dos” (Bossip 2015). This list could go on. In the face of this discouraging present-day picture, hope for a better future would seem to be vital. Black hope in particular would appear crucial for enabling black people to carry on in the face of ongoing white domination and racial inequities. On this view, hope for a better world, a world that does not yet exist but that serves as a guiding ideal, is needed to provide the emotional fuel for the hard work that it will take to get closer to that world. To switch metaphors, black hope would seem to emotionally counterbalance the despair that white economic, social, geographical, and other forms of privilege will never end, both the despair of black people who suffer from white racism and that of white people who call for racism’s demise. As Patrick Shade has argued, “Hoping can be sustaining, nurturing—indeed, advantageous. … And so [in a cynical world] we should salvage the good name of hope and actively promote its life at every turn” (2001, 6, 202). While Shade’s pragmatist theory makes clear that hope must be grounded in present realities, it also depicts hope as tied inextricably to better possibilities in the future. Shade’s positive view of hope complements that of Cornel West. Fighting what he calls “the specter of despair [that] haunts America,” West (2005) has made the most influential case for the importance of hope for African American people and communities. His criticism of black nihilism develops a conception of hope that is as deeply existentialist as it is pragmatist: it responds to the absurdity of a world that is built on the injustices and cruelties of white slavery, white segregation, white supremacy, and white class privilege. Even more important from West’s perspective, his conception of hope offers an alternative to the despair that he worries has pervaded African American lives. West appreciates that other emotions such as rage can serve as an antidote to despair, but he instead counsels hope. According to West (1993), the source of the “nihilistic threat” to and “major enemy of black survival in America is neither oppression nor exploitation but rather the loss of hope.” For West, hope is the emotion that best describes black Americans’ history of struggle and that can keep black people sane in the ongoing struggles of the present. It is communal and inclusive, striving to make the world a more just place for everyone and particularly to “sustain black solidarity in the midst of a hostile society” (West 1999, 437). West’s hope is for the end of the “existential alienation, isolation and separation” that is entangled with racist discourses and that plagues many Western cultures (1999, 263). To its credit, West’s particular account of hope is not Pollyannaish. For West, hope is not equivalent to optimism or to any other merely positive feeling. Optimism isn’t tough enough to do the job that black people need, as West (2005) charges: “Optimism adopts the role of the spectator who surveys the evidence in order to infer that things are going to get better. Yet we know that the evidence does not look good. The dominant tendencies of our day are unregulated global capitalism, racial balkanization, social breakdown, and individual depression.” In contrast, hope is actively participant and grounded, but also not bound by what the evidence tells us. Unlike optimism, West explains, “hope looks at the evidence and says, ‘It doesn’t look good at all. Doesn’t look good at all. Gonna go beyond the evidence to create new possibilities based on visions that become contagious to allow people to engage in heroic actions always against the odds, no guarantee whatsoever.’ That’s hope” (quoted in A. Smith 2006, 160). Optimism also tends to run out of energy when the going gets difficult. “When you talk about hope, you have to be a long distance runner,” West (2008, 209) insists, because it is going to take time and hard work to make racial progress in the United States. On West’s view, however, significant progress has been made. He would sharply characterize as “narrow” the view that things are no better for black people today than they were in the days of slavery. He argues that “progressive formations have been the history of black folk” and that additional “progressive possibilities are reemerging” in the twenty-first century (2008, 214). For West, the road toward racial equality might be long, hard, and even difficult to discern, but it can and does lead to a genuinely democratic America that lives up to its constitutional promise of freedom and liberty for all. Black people are crucial to the realization of this possibility according to West, and thus they need to buoy themselves up with hope. In West’s opinion, Americans need to acknowledge “the degree to which black people in America provide one of the fundamental keys to the future, if the future is going to be about freedom and equality” (2008, 194). West’s ideal of deep democracy in America thus is fueled by black people’s “hope linked to combative spirituality,” which empowers black people to “go against the grain and muster the love and will to resist” (2008, 209). For all the absurdity of white domination and West’s refusal to be optimistic about its defeat, West’s notion of communal hope—like that of most pragmatists, I would surmise—is deeply humanist. I use “humanism” here in the sense that Albert Camus (1991) characterizes it. As Camus would charge, West’s humanism refuses to believe in the permanence of white racism and/or that the evil of white racism cannot someday be overcome by human struggle. (I will return to Camus below in the context of Bell’s work.) Or perhaps it would be more accurate to call West’s progressivism as much religious as it is pragmatist because of the prophetic Christianity that informs it. Human beings alone might not be able to overcome racist evil; they might need religious help to do so. Either way, however, West’s existential progressivism/pragmatism is grounded in a conviction that the right thing will happen in the end. However bad things look now, however difficult it is to envision a happy ending, we can go beyond the evidence and engage in heroic actions to create a better future. Racial inequalities might still exist, so the progressive story continues, but think about how our ancestors went against the odds and overcame chattel slavery and Jim Crow. With ongoing political struggle, we also can do that—we can make the leap. We today can improve the world’s racial situation even further. Don’t give up hope: racial justice can and will be achieved someday. But what if someday never comes? What if, as Bell has argued, the political, legal, and historical circumstances of the United States have made “racism … an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society” and thus “Black people will never gain full equality in this country” (1992a, ix, 12; see also Bell 1992b)? In that case, ongoing hope that political struggle will end racism is a farce: a joke that mocks black people without their realizing it, hoodwinking them into thinking that better times are on the horizon if they only will suffer and struggle more to reach them. According to Bell, that’s a fair assessment of where things stand in the United States at the end of the twentieth century, and by extension at the beginning of the twenty-first. Federal civil rights laws and policies, such as affirmative action, the desegregation of US schools, voting rights acts (which, notably, were eliminated by the US Supreme Court in October 2013), and fair housing acts, have failed to overcome the devastating legacy of chattel slavery in the United States. Bell writes in 1992 that the income gap between the rich and poor—a very racially colored gap—was nearing a crisis point, but the gap he was concerned about is a mere sliver compared to the chasm of racial disparities in wealth that exist today (Bell 1992a, 8–9). The economic recession of 2008 was particularly hard on black households in the United States; by 2010 the median net household worth of white American families was twenty-two times that of black American families (Luhby 2012). The water fountain signs in the United States that say “colored” and “white” may have disappeared, but post-segregation changes such as these do not mean that racial discrimination has disappeared, or even necessarily been weakened. They might mean merely that the form of racial discrimination has changed and, moreover, changed into something largely unofficial and delivered via race-neutral policies and language that only makes white class privilege more difficult to identify and combat. In that case, as Bell predicts, “even those herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary ‘peaks of progress,’ short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance” (1992b, 373). Black Americans need to accept that white racism is as virulent as ever and that they will always have a “permanent subordinate status” in their country (1992a, 12). Bell realized very soon after the civil rights era that the idea that the United States is making progress against racism tends merely to inflate the egos and assuage the guilt of good white liberals. “The worship of equality rules benefits whites by preserving a benevolent but fictional selfimage, and such worship benefits blacks by preserving hope,” Bell observes and then adds, “but I think we’ve arrived at a place in history where the harms of such worship outweigh its benefits” (1992a, 101). Along with the belief that white people and institutions will ever regard or treat black people as equals, black people need to jettison the hopeful expectation that white racism will ever end. Acknowledging “the permanence of [black people’s] subordinate status” in the United States, Bell explains, “allows [black Americans] to avoid despair, and frees [them] to imagine and implement racial strategies that can bring fulfillment and even triumph” (1992b, 373–374). Most people—especially, but not only white people—have yet to acknowledge how resilient white domination is in the United States. From chattel slavery to Jim Crow to “the new Jim Crow” (Alexander 2012), the more white domination changes, the more it stays the same. “Supposedly, the generation that murdered Trayvon Martin and Renisha McBride is much better than the generation that murdered Emmett Till,” Warren dryly remarks, and this so-called improvement is supposed to encourage black people that even more “progress” in black lives—and deaths—can be achieved (2015, 217). As Warren’s quip suggests, by participating in hopeful political struggle for a future filled with racial equality that likely never will be present, West’s existential pragmatism not only unintentionally benefits white people. It also harms black people by enacting what Warren calls “the politics of hope,” which establishes an insidiously false dichotomy between hope and nihilism. On the logic of political hope, if a person or group of people doesn’t have a hopeful relationship to the future, then they must be sunk in nihilistic despair. The politics of hope thus “terrifies with the dread of ‘no alternative,’ ” which operates not just via the binary of hope/despair but also by the complementary binaries of “problem/solution” and “action/inaction” (2015, 222). If one hopes and takes action, one can find a future solution to today’s problems. According to the politics of hope, hope is necessary for motivating political action to find answers to racial problems. Giving up hope thus raises the specter of inaction, of doing nothing and thus accepting the racist status quo. Hopelessness thus is the equivalent of a failed relationship to the future, which in turn is the equivalent of refusing to fight racial injustice. The lure of the always-not-yet solution to present-day racial problems is symptomatic of the metaphysical nature of political hope, according to Warren. Political hope’s future object of racial justice is “not tethered to real history,” which makes it an “object of political fantasy” rather than an achievable goal (Warren 2015, 221). “The objective of the Political is to keep blacks in relation to this political object—in an unending pursuit of it,” Warren explains, and this pursuit “strengthens the very anti-black system that would pulverize black being” (2015, 221). Black people’s political struggle for this fantastical freedom enables modern societies to pride themselves on their advanced civilization; in this way, black suffering is necessary for modernity’s promises of progress. Freedom as modernity knows it was created by means of chattel slavery, and thus “black emancipation is world destructive” for modernity and its ideals (Patterson 1982; see also Warren 2015, 239). Black suffering cannot be ended without the known world coming to an end, and so the world uses black hope to keep black suffering in place (Warren 2015, 242). While Warren’s argument against the politics of hope primarily targets its metaphysical nature, the destruction of black bodies that he analyzes is no mere abstraction. Neither, of course, are the intractable racial inequalities described by Bell. In both cases, antiblackness involves “the literal destruction of black bodies that provide the psychic, economic, and philosophical resources for modernity to objectify, forget, and ultimately obliterate Being (nonmetaphysical Being)” (Warren 2015, 327). This occurred initially through the transatlantic transformation of human beings into things (slaves) and then subsequently through other social, legal, and extralegal ways of annihilating black people and communities, including political tactics such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and the convict leasing system (2015, 216). Recent developments in the medical health sciences reveal another material way to see how the metaphysical, legal, and economic destruction of black people via hope is both literal and physical. A concrete connection between hope and poor health and death exists for black Americans, and I now turn to that connection to bodily situate Bell’s and Warren’s accounts. Psychologists and other social scientists in the United States recently have focused on how African Americans cope with so-called mundane racism: not the big-booted racism of chattel slavery, lynching, or even legalized segregation, but rather the more mundane and subtle or “invisible” racial attacks that increasingly are being documented in post–Jim Crow America. Examples include the student who rolls his eyes in class when he realizes that the black woman at the front of the room will be his professor or the black person checking out at the grocery store who gets hassled to show several forms of identification to cash her check when the white person in front of her did not. In many ways, microaggressions such as these are minor in comparison to the major assaults that African Americans historically have experienced and still do experience. At minimum, racial microaggressions are not spectacularly horrific in the way that the overt violence of shootings and chokeholds is. But just because we tend not to notice the destructiveness of racial microaggressions does not mean they are trivial. Racial microaggressions can be deadly, although we (especially white people) often don’t recognize or want to acknowledge their violent effects.

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De facto white class privilege in the form of racial microaggressions contributes to people of color's "racial battle fatigue," which entails "the constant use or redirection of energy for coping against mundane racism which depletes psychological and physiological resources needed in other important, creative, and productive area of life" (Smith, Hung, and Franklin 2012, 40). Racial battle fatigue has been linked empirically to depression, tension, and generalized anxiety disorder in African Americans, and the stress associated with all of these psychological problems also contributes to physiological weathering that harms black health, contributing to high rates of hypertension, cardiovascular disease, pre-term birth rates, and infant mortality to name a few (Smith, Hung and Franklin 2012, 37, 40; D. Smith 2012). The effects of white racism literally get inside and help constitute the bodies of black people in harmful ways. They wear down the body's various systems by creating a high allostatic load via stressors that accumulate over time. The results are health problems such as disproportionately high rates of pre-term birth, infant mortality, cardio-vascular disease, diabetes, and accelerated physiological aging (Blitstein 2009). Racism hurts—literally—and it also kills in ways that are subtler but no less deadly than the lyncher's noose or the neighbors Met (Drexler 2007). These effects, moreover, can be transgenerational, physiologically passed onto subsequent generations through various epigenetic changes (Sullivan 2013).