Race and Loss: Between Resistance and Refusal

• In Event: Disappointed Hopes: Reclaiming the Promise of Resistance

Abstract

Narratives of left melancholia sit uneasily with the realities of white supremacist-imposed losses faced by people of color. Black thinkers in particular have not given into despair when faced with the unending reality of continued white supremacy. For example, in the United States, victories over racism have been at best partial and always immediately followed by racist backlash, but African Americans did not give in to despair or mere acquiescence. This was true of the abolition of slavery which segued immediately into the overturning of the gains of Reconstruction and the reimposition of Jim Crow and Herrenvolk democracy. Faced with no-hope or acquiescence, African American thinkers cultivated what Du Bois called “a hope not hopeless but unhopeful,” and found other ways to continue to resist and work toward utopian political projects beyond a belief in imminent victory. The obverse of this is that the challenge for black thinkers and for black people generally is not how not to succumb to left melancholia but rather how to grieve beyond grievance, how not to turn their losses immediately into the grounds of activism. In contrast to the mythology of white grievance that coalesced around the Lost Cause then, black thinkers were forced to find reasons to continue to struggle in service of causes not lost. For racialized persons the question is not simply how to avoid despair, but how to resist in the face of racial recalcitrance while also engaging in practices of refusal. This is particularly important because progressive political projects—and indeed US democracy as a whole—have been parasitic on the energies of people of color, especially black people, for progress toward racial justice and fulfilling the vaunted but never fully realized claims of US democracy. Today we are seeing today the radical right is finding another lost cause to further entrench a politics of white grievance that fuels resistance to any projects of true multiracial democracy. For the Right, then, failure seems to be galvanizing. But for the Left the challenge is to think with, and work with black freedom projects — which have historically been propelled by black grief — without cannibalizing those projects in service of whitewashed projects of fundamental societal transformation.

Author

• Juliet Hooker, Brown University