White Christian Hope is Flabby
A reflection on hope in anticipation of the 7th annual Kingdom Justice Summit on February 27 with the theme of Hope.
By Christine Jeske
Fellow white Christians, our hope is flabby.
This pandemic has tested the resilience of our hope, and we’ve come up lacking. Remember when people hoped this might end by Easter of 2020? The past year brought a litany of crushed hopes—schools reopening by fall, jobs resuming, that loved ones’ health be spared, that this could all just be over.
And part of what hurt so much through this all was learning how to deal with unmet hopes. For white people especially, I am convinced that our hopes are often built on the expectation that things will continue as they always have, which for us is generally pretty good. We assume things will turn out fine because in our narrow vision of the world things always seem to turn out fine. We believe that good opportunities always arise, that technology solves all problems, and that good people get good lives. Scratch beneath the surface, and what we call hope is a cover for optimism built on the intentionally blinkered worldview afforded us by centuries of stealing opportunities, ignoring inequities, and believing in our own manifest destiny.
Our hope, in short, has been founded on privilege and willful blindness. That hope is only as strong as our ability to plug our ears to the neighbors for whom “returning to normal” was never a solution in the first place. Our hope never had answers for people for whom schools, jobs, systems, and technologies have not been designed to work, whose hopes were thwarted by the same systems that seemed to drop opportunities like floating snowflakes into the hands of white people.
And operating on a privilege-based hope is especially dangerous because white people love to “bring hope.” We start organizations with names like Building Hope, New Hope, Hope House, and Bridges of Hope. We show up in places of brokenness and declare ourselves the bearers of hope. But what we hand people is a sham hope without substance.
Medical studies have shown that humans in fact need hope—being able to name one’s hopes correlates with better survival rates for illnesses and improving mental health. But relying a sham hope based on opportunities disproportionately extended to white people isn’t healthy, it’s cruel, because it ignores the actual obstacles that we as a society need to fix.
Theologian Miguel De La Torre, in a book called Embracing Hopelessness, offers a scathing critique of white hope: “To construct liberative methodology upon Eurocentric philosophical paradigms is to construct resistance on shifting sand, thus contributing to our own oppression.” He says white people have often tried to pacify oppressed people using unrealistic visions of hope, which ultimately keep people from taking the risks necessary to create change. “What is needed is disruption of the norm to push humanity toward an unachievable justice. When there is nothing to lose, when work does not set you free, not only are multiple possibilities opened up with new opportunities for radical change unimaginable to those playing it safe; but also a venue is provided by which to get real with whatever this God signifies.”
Although the title of De La Torre’s book is Embracing Hopelessness, I believe what he points us toward isn’t less hope, but a more robust, tested, rugged, and bloodied hope. Cornell West calls this kind of hope “blues hope.” He says throughout the history of this nation, African Americans have learned to forge a “hope without optimism.” It’s a hope that speaks honestly about insurmountable woes and every reason to lament, but still carries on singing. It’s a hope Barack Obama tapped into when he titled his book with the words of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, calling for the “audacity of hope.”
It’s no accident that the people I’ve cited to explain this kind of hope are People of Color. Esau McCaulley, in Reading While Black, points out that the Black ecclesial tradition “has a distinctive message of hope.” He says Black people have had to wrestle with the struggle between “Black nihilism and Black hope.” The Black hope that wins out after enduring centuries of systemic discrimination, exclusion, and violence is not a flabby hope. To learn that kind of weathered hope, Christians need hope-teachers who have forged their hope outside the walls of privilege. Paul teaches in Romans 5 that hope comes not from an easy life, but from suffering producing perseverance, perseverance forming character, and character producing hope. I’m not saying white people never endure hardship or never achieve a depth to their hope. But among the features of the culture of whiteness and the experiences afforded white people is a set of circumstances that tend to produce weak hope.
One point in my life when I noticed the need for hope teachers was in 2008 as the world plunged into a recession. I was working at a seminary in South Africa that was, for reasons mostly far beyond our control, running out of money. One afternoon I joined a group of faculty and students from across Africa to pray for the college. These students would have scholarships and chances at education stripped away, and faculty would lose hard won jobs. As these African sisters and brothers cried out to the Lord, I realized I had no hope to offer here. I brought only what I gained from my upbringing—rich people to contact, skills for writing newsletters, and familiarity with organizations flush with cash. I did not bring what this situation called for, which was a hope substantial enough to endure an imminent disaster. I looked around at people who had spent all their life savings on tuition, who had left spouses and children in home countries, who grew up familiar with hunger, who had fled wars and genocides. These brothers and sisters, had some seriously weathered hope. And right here I was definitely not the Bringer of Hope.
As an anthropologist studying racism, in recent years I interviewed families of white people from America, Europe, and South Africa who lived at length in predominantly Black South African neighborhoods. When I asked how these years transformed their white families, they talked about learning new ways of hope. Often they described a progression like this: They showed up full of eager optimism. They became overwhelmed by complexity and depth of the challenges facing their neighborhoods. And they plummeted into despair. But those who remained gained a different kind of hope. Their hope had hit bottom and had been rescued by a God who himself took the worst hits of this world and came through scarred but alive again. Their hope wasn’t that things would change soon, or at grand scale, or even necessarily in their lifetimes, but that God was still God. Period.
This is the hope demonstrated by one who “made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant,” and “became obedient to death” (Phil. 2:6, 8). In that hope, Christ rescued the lost, touched unclean bodies, spoke truth to power, prayed in the anguish of sweat falling like blood, and walked steadily toward death on a cross.
White people need to turn from trusting in “chariots and in horses” to trusting “in the name of the Lord our God,” as Psalm 20 says. Like ancient Israelites trusting in chariots, we have hoped in technologies available only to the privileged few and in systems designed to inflict violence on others. We have gone so far as to preach this chariot-based hope to people who were harmed by chariots, systematically deprived of chariots, and whose children cried to sleep at night for want of chariots.
We need instead a hope like that of Shadrack, Meshach, and Abednego who faced their own immanent deaths saying “God is able to save us from it,” “but even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold” (Dan. 3:17-18).
Hope is not wishing, white friends. It’s not expecting things will go as they have always gone. It’s seeing all the reasons things very likely will not go well, and knowing still that light shines in darkness, and darkness does not overcome it (Jn. 1:5). It’s giving up opportunities to cower in the safest enclaves, tossing out the tender shield of fake hope we’ve hidden behind, and determining that by God’s grace, whatever happens, “after you have done everything, to stand” (Eph. 6:13).
Christine Jeske is an Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Wheaton College and author of three books, including most recently The Laziness Myth. Between years living in Nicaragua, China, and South Africa, she has lived in Madison for over 15 years.
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