Black American hope is tempered realism born of lifelong racial constraint

Evidence

Obama reminds me of Herman Melville’s Confidence Man: he sees exactly what we want and what we fear and adjusts himself accordingly. And what Melville believed people wanted more than anything was hope, a sense of the possibility of things for themselves and for the world. I am not sure Melville understood, although he might have, the depth of that claim for black folk. For us, hope has always come with a heavy dose of realism. It couldn’t be otherwise in a world such as ours, where the color of your skin closes off certain possibilities from the moment you draw your first breath. W. E. B. Du Bois captured it best as “a hope not hopeless but unhopeful”—a blues-soaked sensibility that chastens one’s expectations of the world, because the white people in it can be so hateful and mean. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 21

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the blues-soaked ‘hope not hopeless but unhopeful’ sensibility that grounds what Glaude opposes to Obama’s sunny optimism.
• ADDENDUM: This blues-soaked hope as infrastructure thinking parallels how the sacrifice essay treats communal grief rituals.