Reflections on Hope

Maybe hope without struggle is hollow, and struggle without hope won't last.

This is just a reflection on hope. What I’m writing here isn’t a concrete belief, but something I am wrestling with internally but my hope is that putting some of these thoughts on paper will help me better understand why hope isn’t as central to my praxis as it seems to be for others right now.

When I think about where my real relationship with hope began, it was when I started hoping my father would come home. Anyone who knows me, or knows my story, knows that my father was incarcerated when I was two years old. At first, my mother told me he was on vacation — afraid to expose her little Black boy to the harshness of the world. But when we started visiting him in prison, it became clear that those white walls, heavy mechanical doors, and watchful guards were no vacation.

I still remember what it felt like to be picked up by my father. To feel his warmth. To get one of those big kisses on my head as he called me boo. I remember wishing that moment would never end — hoping he could come home so those feelings could be part of my everyday life.

When we got home, my mother — at no fault of her own — wanted to make sure I saw a light at the end of the tunnel. She wanted me to hold onto hope. So she told me he’d be home to:

“see you graduate from middle school.”
“see you play your first high school basketball game.”
“see you graduate from high school.”
“watch your college football games.”
“see you graduate from college.”

He didn’t come home until I was 26.

24 years of waiting.

24 years apart.

That’s a long time to be hopeful.

If I’m being honest, by high school, I stopped believing what my mom said. I think I kept pretending for her sake — because I knew it was just as much about her as it was about me. She dreamed of a family, of my happiness, of me having what other boys had with their fathers. And I know she saw how much I was struggling. I don’t fault her for any of it — I can’t imagine how hard it was to navigate all that alone.

But for me, those years taught me something different. At first, I told myself: if I want something, I have to make it a reality. But really, that came later. What came first was a kind of defense mechanism. I stopped letting myself get too excited about what wasn’t right in front of me. Even now, I find it hard to feel joy about the future until it’s happening. It’s like my mind doesn’t allow me to believe in what’s coming until I can touch it.

Maybe that’s why I’ve always struggled with the language of hope. It asks me to believe in something I can’t yet feel, and for most of my life, that belief has felt dangerous.

I also know that for many people — especially those who’ve endured generations of violence and loss — hope has been a kind of survival. Sometimes the only thing that kept our people alive was believing there would be another morning. I don’t reject that kind of hope. But for me, the hope that asks me to wait feels too close to surrender. The hope I trust lives in motion, in the doing.

Faith and Hope

The second thing that shaped my perspective on hope was my experience with Christianity and faith. Maybe a lesser-known fact about me is that I grew up in a Christian home. I went to a private Christian high school and, for most of my youth, I would’ve considered myself a pretty religious person. That’s changed over the years as I’ve tried to distance myself from the white Christian nationalist project that dominates much of religion in the United States. Still, my relationship with faith, like for many people, is complicated. I’ve seen the great harm it’s caused — both systemically and interpersonally — but I’ve also seen the good, and I’ve been shaped by that good.

This part isn’t about religion itself, but about faith and hope. From my perspective, Christianity, like many religions, places a heavy emphasis on having faith — believing that “God’s will shall be done.” There’s the promise of a better future, the reward of salvation, the idea that long suffering in this world will be paid back in the next. You’re taught to put your faith and hope in God, to trust that He will protect you and deliver you in time.

But for me, those parts of the Bible never really resonated. What stayed with me were the stories of people who didn’t just pray and wait for salvation to come — they worked to make it real. They lived principled lives and fought to improve the conditions of those who suffered. No one embodied that more than Jesus himself.

When I was seventeen and really diving into my “Jesus bag,” I was deeply moved by his simple message: love your neighbor. But what struck me most was that Jesus actually lived it — he spent his time with the most marginalized people, fed the hungry, healed the sick, and challenged the powers that oppressed them. I never saw those stories as an invitation to sit and wait for blessings. I saw them as a call to action — to go out and do the work myself.

With the little money I had, I started feeding people experiencing homelessness, giving away my clothes, and, maybe most importantly, just talking with them. There was one man I used to visit who lived down in the riverbed near my mom’s apartment. What stuck with me from those conversations was how many systems had failed him — how much pain, trauma, and neglect he had endured. I often wondered whether I could have survived what he did.

That experience planted something in me. At the time, I didn’t have a structural analysis — that came years later — but the seed was planted due to those conversations and was eventually watered in my later years. I began to realize that my faith wasn’t just about belief; it was about practice. That loving your neighbor means acting in the world. That prayer might offer comfort, but it doesn’t feed people, free people, or change conditions on its own.

As Fannie Lou Hamer said, “You can pray until you faint, but if you don’t get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap.”

And I also know my perspective isn’t new. Across history, there have always been believers — from the Black church to liberation theologians across the world — who understood faith as struggle, not submission. They preached that to love God was to fight for the poor, to free the captive, to challenge empire. That’s the faith that still makes sense to me — one grounded in action, not abstraction.

If prayer alone could end suffering, the Bible would be a book of prayers — not a record of people’s struggles, actions, and collective efforts to bring heaven closer to earth.

Right now, things are bad. They’re getting worse. And yet, they are not the worst they’ve ever been.

What prompted me to start writing about hope is that I work in the movement — in other words, I work alongside our communities to improve the lives of people by meeting their needs, building power and changing systems. One of the questions that comes up often in movement spaces is, “What is keeping you hopeful?” or “How are you sustaining hope?” I’ve asked those questions myself, so this isn’t about shaming anyone.

The United States — and the world — is going through major economic, political, and social restructuring. The violence this country has long exported abroad is now turning inward: violent migration raids, economic insecurity, National Guard deployments, and what feels like an accelerating turn toward fascism. On top of that, we’ve all witnessed a genocide over the past three years, watched ecosystems older than humanity collapse — like the coral reef — and seen famine and warfare devastate Sudan. So yes, questions about hope are valid. Hope is often what keeps people from falling into nihilism.

But at least for those of us here in the U.S., I often think about how, as bad as things are, the conditions for those who came before us were unimaginably worse. And yet, they fought. They dreamed. They built. I think about Palestinians who, even under bombardment and famine, continue to resist.

For my formerly enslaved ancestors, I imagine hope was not some distant feeling but something bound up in the act of survival itself. Hope wasn’t abstract — it was forged in the act of breaking a chain, whispering a plan, stealing away in the night, teaching a child to read, or holding fast to each other through centuries of terror. For them, hope wasn’t about one day being free — it was the fight for freedom. Each act of resistance, no matter how small, was both defiance and faith in motion.

I have a neighbor from Yemen. Every time I see him, we talk about politics and what’s happening in the Middle East. One day, I asked him, “Do the people out there still have the will to fight?” He looked at me, more fired up than I’d ever seen him, and said, “The resistance will never die. It doesn’t matter how much money they have, how many weapons they have, or how many of us they kill. We will keep fighting because it’s in our culture, in our blood.”

That conversation stayed with me. It connected me to something I’ve always felt — that the will to resist is not unique to any one people. It’s a shared inheritance across the oppressed. In my own lineage, that same fire burns. Our tradition is one of resistance. We resisted in the belly of slave ships. We resisted in the cotton fields of Mississippi, the rice swamps of South Carolina, the cane fields of Louisiana. Wherever we were oppressed, we resisted. Wherever there was repression, we resisted.

What often gets framed as our “resilience” is really a story of rebellion — of people who refused to accept premature death and extinction. Yes, some prayed for a better world. But just as many rebelled and risked everything to make one.

Synthesizing Hope and Collective Action

Maybe it was both. Maybe hope and resistance are not opposites but reflections of each other — one spiritual, one material. Maybe hope without struggle is hollow, and struggle without hope won’t last.

The more I write and think about this, the answer, of course, is not either/or. Hope — and collectively developing a vision for the future — is critical, just as much as our collective action to build toward that vision.

I guess I’m ending this by saying that struggle makes belief tangible. But one thing I want people to remember and hold deeply is that while hope is important, it ebbs and flows. And whether you’re feeling hopeful or not, you still have a responsibility to keep fighting.

Whether the wind is pushing us forward or pushing us back, our responsibility is the same: to fight. Some say the will to fight comes from believing another world is possible — and I’d just add that if you want people to have hope, get them to fight. Help them win something real, so their hope lives in themselves and in the collective.

I’m not going to spend too much time editing this specific piece because again, it’s just a reflection and I am going to continue struggling through my feelings on it, but here are a feel questions that continue to come up for me:

• Were my enslaved ancestors moved by hope for a better future, or by the refusal to live in chains another day? Was it hope that sustained them, or the fire to be free?

• A brother recently told me that people are too damn hopeful—that hope keeps us from seeing how bad this moment really is, and from doing what must be done. Is there truth in that? Maybe.

• And finally: are we, sitting here in the belly of the beast, a little ridiculous to still be talking about hope? Maybe ridiculous. Maybe necessary. IDK.