Belief in a better future can be as real as material work.

Evidence

“Rainbows, they pretty, but they ain’t real,” she said. “The only thing real down here sometimes feels like suffering. And love.” … I told Rae that I liked her more than apple Now and Laters. But if believing in rainbows makes us love better, then rainbows can be just as real as work. And love. And if we really believed, we might be able to bring Dafinas’s granny back. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1215

Categorization

• APHORISMS: Rae’s line — only suffering and love are real — is a hard-won wisdom about what is dependable in a world built against you.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s case-study interest: the tension between aspirational reframing (rainbows) and empirical despair (only suffering is real) mirrors the reframing-vs-empirical-claims dispute in the 1619 controversy. — connects to: Belief can actively construct the future it anticipates — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1967