ABSTRACT
In a conversation between Angela Davis and CBS correspondent Lillia Luciano about Davis’s life-long commitment to radical activism, Davis proclaims, “No change is possible without hope … no movement is possible without hope”. 1 Alluding specifically to the urgency of building a world that would not require “persistent interventions of police and imprisonment”, Davis attests to the inseparability of hope and the possibility of change, kinetic motion, and transformation. While hope is not sufficient and might not lead to the kind of change that abolitionists desire, there will certainly be no positive change (towards freedom, racial justice, socio-economic equity) without collective desires and aspirations for a more promising future (and belief that this future is possible and viable in part because this belief is actualized in practices and struggles). Davis’s call for the indispensability of hope, especially to an abolition project, would seem to go against the arguments made by authors associated with Afro-pessimism, Black nihilism, and so forth. According to Calvin Warren, for instance, political hope, or hope that is directed towards political ends and goals, relies on the perpetuation of Black suffering. He claims that “the logic of the Political—linear temporality, biopolitical futurity, perfection, betterment, redress—sustains black suffering” (Warren 2015, 218). The structures of the political and the grammar of progress cannot redress, but can only reproduce, the “metaphysical structures that pulverize black being” (218). And while this sounds bleak, Warren is not against hope per se but against a certain conception of hope or an unquestioned set of assumptions about the content and destination of hope.
