I. Sharon

The star of my high school cross country team was a hockey player who ran like a wind-up soldier. While the rest of us pushed our stride out low and long (under the, in my case faulty, impression that this would make us aerodynamic), Sharon…marched. But wicked fast, like the 60 Minutes stopwatch: tickticktickticktick, her short brown ponytail bouncing.

At every meet, Sharon’s competitors from other schools would mill around the starting line, side-eyeing her. They'd leap at the starting pistol, arms pumping and chins up, running for their lives and for their opportunity to beat the phenom. For the first fifty yards, Sharon looked silly, ticking steadily behind a herd of long-legged gazelles.

You know the end of this story!—or, rather, its middle: a mile into the race, the runners who’d dashed off the line were wobbling and miserable. Sharon was a hundred yards ahead of the pack: tickticktickticktick.

II. Hope

I’ve noticed that when a public thinker or activist is interviewed for a majority-white audience (about prison reform, maybe, or police brutality or income inequality), the interviewer’s last question is almost always “what gives you hope?” It can make me a little queasy, this perky insistence on a happy ending, but man, do I understand the impulse. We need capital-H Hope, something solid and warm like a table in the sun, to keep us semi-sane in these troubled times.

Recently some friends and I ate dinner with the Rev. Anthony Jermaine Ross-Allam, the new (and first) director of the Presbyterian Mission Agency’s Center for Repair of Historical Harms. On the topic of whether there’s hope for the end of white supremacy in this country, he was clear: it’s there, and it’s actionable.

He gets exasperated, he said, with the amateur social justice warriors who strain under a thick layer of melancholy, bitterly martyring themselves for a marginally-better future, because they imagine white supremacy as an omnipotent and unbeatable supernatural force. Huh.

Rev. Jermaine’s hope is both spiritual (it’s, after all, an imperative for Christians) and pragmatic. Racism isn’t an invulnerable universal power. It is a machine—a set of social, economic, and linguistic practices—that humans created and maintain, and we can decommission it.

A future where some individuals have racist little hearts but the white supremacist machine is busted and dusty? It’s real and doable.

Activists’ answers to the perennial hope question always follow the same pattern: nothing is giving them hope. Hope isn’t handed over, a brown paper package tied up with string.

Hope is enacted, participatory.

Always, what they describe are the mundane actions of ordinary people, people in formation just getting up and getting shit done: changing laws by hounding their senators, feeding babies by showing up every day at their food pantry shifts, loosening the grip on big wealth by giving it away a little or a lot at a time. We don’t find hope, we do hope; we join hope.

III. Habits

Between 2016 and 2021, lots of white Americans experienced an oh-shit wakeup call about the racism and misogyny and generalized virulent hatred just under the surface of polite US society. We’d been peacefully dozing, and then America shot a starting pistol in our ears. We leaped up, bewildered, and started hustling, like the well-meaning white ladies we are: Marches! Book clubs! Donations! Classes! With the unbridled self-efficacy of the Mama Bear, we saw a fight we cared about and leapt right in, thinking our work and attention could win it, fix it, if we all just sprinted fast enough.

And then: we got tired. We burned out. Our muscles were weak, our practices underdeveloped; we did the same “dash and crash” that ruined so many of Sharon’s would-be rivals.

I don’t say this to shame us. We all know that it’s bullshit that we can “burn out” or experience “compassion fatigue” or “need a few years’ break from the news,” while our siblings of color and our poor siblings and our Majority World siblings—the people “the news” is happening to, at, on—never get a break from it.

But obviously, obviously, the struggle to build the table didn’t end with a single American election. We all know that the world is hard and getting harder. If we want to be table people, we need to start enacting hope through our habits.

Anthony Trollope wrote that “a small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the efforts of a spasmodic Hercules.” Tickticktickticktick. Ain’t none of us Hercules, but we can all take on small daily (or weekly, or monthly) habits to join, not fix, the struggle for justice.

* * * * *

What do you think? Are you willing/ready to add some new habits to your life, one at a time? (I’ve started reading habit-formation books to summarize for us, because “adding new habits” is, um, not as easy as it sounds.)

What justice habits do you already have in place? Daily, weekly, monthly, annually? We’ve got to share what works, avoid reinventing the wheel.

And what do you think about this idea of enacting, rather than finding, hope?