Hope is necessary to sustain black politics and visions, give meaning to struggles for justice, and is worthwhile even if it fails to achieve all of its intentions – totalizing ideologies are bad.

We must finally ask whether African Americans can rely on a totalizing ideology to shape our visions of black justice and our future in America. My answer is no. I believe we need a more flexible approach than ideologies such as black Marxism, black nationalism, and at least the Cold War version of liberalism have allowed. We need a black critical theory that draws on and combines liberalism’s concern with individual rights and autonomy, republican concerns with community, socialist concern with an egalitarian society and economic justice for all, feminist traditions such as resistance to suppressing intragroup differences in the name of a false and oppressive unity, and blends these with recognition of the need for autonomous organization and cultural pride. No single world view or ideology comfortably accommodates all of these. But a critical theory can—and such a theory must be political. We’ve had a black aesthetic, black power, and a plethora of black public policy pronouncements. But a black political theory has to embody a theory of the state, power, human nature, and the good life. And such a theory must be based on the hope for and potential of the improvement of human nature while recognizing the wickedness of the world. Kantian pronouncements about systems that can be governed by devils have led us to a world where ethnic strife and nuclear and other horrors proliferate. We must strive for something better, something democratic, something cosmopolitan, not in the elite sense but in the sense that, since homogeneity is a thing of the past, even within states, we must fall back on our basic humanness. It is no coincidence that within American political thought this perspective appears most often in the black traditions and in black political thought, at least in the contemporary period—most often in the black feminist tradition. Thus the best legacy of black political ideologies for America is a tough, activist, inclusive democracy willing to challenge privileges of power and resources in the name of a grander vision which asserts that we are more than the mere aggregation of our individual preferences. Its morality, while democratic, would not be based on the latest consumer fad nor use the return to stockholders as the final arbiter of the public good. That we often fail in living up to our standards of justice within black activism as well as within America—that we are imperfect as individuals and as communities—does not mean, as King so eloquently demonstrated, that the vision itself is not a worthy goal. What black critical theory and each black ideology have demonstrated is that the doable, the mundane, incremental reform of the workings of American society is not enough; only the full promise of America has the potential to be truly liberating. Any other solution is not only unsatisfactory—it is likely to provoke the kind of deadly conflict most clearly seen in the Civil War but also seen today in the rapid upward spiral of political and personal violence which results as people measure their circumstances against what they see as the lies that fester at the center of the American Dream. A new, black, critical theory needs to retain one aspect of black ideological visions. At the heart of all of the black visions is a sense of pragmatic optimism combined with a steadfast determination to gain black justice. Both the optimism and the determination are needed now as ever to sustain the political projects and new visions of African Americans.