Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

by Carolina De Robertis

“I freed a thousand slaves, and I could have saved a thousand more if only they had known they were slaves.”

gave me the strength to always be my own compass.

You broke barriers; you pushed boundaries. I’m sure you had peers who didn’t like how powerful you were, but because you stood in your power, I can stand in mine.

Rage was an essential part of slavery. Rage allows us to forget our own humanity. Without rage, we will recognize another person as like ourselves. It’s hard to hurt someone you’re not angry at; it’s anger that drives the impulse to harm. Rage declares itself through violence, and violence was the platform on which slavery was built. We feel rage when we feel separate; we feel compassion when we feel connected.

The fact of your identity defines your capabilities.

election of 1876, swing votes were tied to the issue of Chinese immigration in the same way that immigration was a hot topic during this election cycle. Rutherford Hayes endorsed Chinese exclusion and won the election. In the following election, James Garfield also carried the torch of anti-Chinese immigration into office. (From those days to now, every presidential election has fanned the flames of anti-immigration. This, Henry, shows that hate and fear are reliable, predictable, and effective political tools.) All this led eventually to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred the entry of all Chinese immigrants to the United States except for those who were teachers, students, diplomats, ministers, or merchants. It also declared all Chinese totally ineligible for naturalized citizenship. This clause alone allowed the United States to join Nazi Germany and South Africa as the only nations ever to withhold naturalization purely on racial grounds.

Perhaps the things that have happened in our family have caused us to have sympathy and empathy for others. If boys want to marry boys or girls want to marry girls, that’s a nice thing, because you know just from looking at your own family that people should get to marry whomever they want. I mean, just think about the party we had a few days ago. It was just the immediate family for Christmas tamales. When you looked around the room, you could see a little of everything—white, mixed, black, Chinese, East Indian, Persian. And religions? Let’s take a journey around the world for that, too. If people don’t like it—and many don’t—so what? But if anyone ever tells one of us that we can’t marry who we want, or we can’t live where we want, or we can’t worship where and how we want, I hope you stand right by my side and do whatever it takes to give the people we love our support and protection.

The collapse of a dam begins with an ant hole.

“Deeds not words.” It’s so simple, yet still essential today, almost a century later. I need a laugh and camaraderie as much as

It’s the same with any social change: we look inside ourselves, look at our pasts, and find what propels us forward into organized action, into a movement.

The world comes at me when I’m drinking coffee or sitting on a bus.

Migrant, which used to be a neutral word, is a term of abuse. We—you, me, your mother, your sister—are migrants. That is our history. Because of that history, because of who we (and our parents) chose to love and where they chose to go, we are cosmopolitan. It’s something I feel proud of, but for others, it seems to be an incitement, a rebuke.

So when people ask you where you’re from, you won’t have a one-word answer for them. Some people, the kind who use cosmopolitan and migrant as insults, will call you rootless. They will call you inauthentic. They will tell you that you lack some important anchor to the earth, that your loves and attachments have less force than theirs because of all the journeys in our family’s past. When they say such things, remind yourself that they, too, are migrants, even if they’ve forgotten it. The human story is one of continual branching movement, out of Africa to every corner of the globe. When people talk of blood and soil, as if their ancestors had sprung fully formed from the earth of a particular place, it involves a kind of forgetting. Place is not nothing, and you need to understand that many families have histories that are unlike ours. There is something noble about staying put and building, something worthy of respect. But there is also something noble about the nomad who carries a whole world in a suitcase. You were born here in New York, in the middle of a February snowstorm, and so this city will always be yours. Perhaps, if we move again to one of the other places whose names your mother and I have murmured to each other across the kitchen table, you may not grow up thinking of it as home. I’m writing to tell you that you don’t need to worry about this. It’s not a loss or a lack. Your experience is no more or less authentic or beautiful than a person who lives on lan...

And here’s one reminder: avoid filling your life with “nice” people who find racism invisible or who second-guess your every instinct on it while indulging in liberal hand-wringing, because eventually, this will drain your inner resources. Seek out people who are “woke”—tell me if I just used a hip word correctly?

For people of color—from those who dwell in the prison of a powerless poverty to those enraptured by exceptional privilege—our silence serves as the perennial grindstone sharpening the amnesia of white America. As such, our radicalism as artists resides in a shared and vocal awakening and a rigorous literacy campaign regarding the specific historical conditions of one another’s colonization and neocolonization and the eruptions of art that resist it. To continue to exclusively understand race in the United States through the black/white lens of the Founding Fathers (i.e., the exploitation, commodification, and enslavement of African Americans alone) is to unwittingly reinforce the genocidal and ethnocidal political structures that have been integral to the very foundation of white supremacy and slavery in this country.

What does it mean to be a Mexican American and a descendant of Native peoples who were living in the United States before it was the United States and still, five hundred years later, be viewed as an immigrant? How might it feel to be a Mexican American and recognize your family’s face in virtually every car wash crew, business park custodial team, restaurant cook, dishwasher, and busboy, and in one out of every four stroller-pushing and bucket-bearing domestic workers…and then to be told that your own relatives are illegal and a drain on the economy?

remember genocide in their DNA;

The American election of 2016 is part of a global fit of white fear, a desperate and deadly shift toward retro nationalism, violent xenophobia, walls, and wars. It was won on the backs of immigrants, of women, of American citizens of color. It was won on fear and desperation, on white anxiety and ignorance—and apathy.

Resistance is urgent; resistance is now. This world, this country, this moment—it requires resilience, steadfastness. It requires hope, love, and a radical commitment to truth and justice. It is a long, hard haul—ask any elder activist, anyone who has spent their life in the Movement, the Struggle—but it is right and necessary work.

Beware a sense of entitlement, Mr. Roell. Beware victimhood. And beware finger-pointing, lest the finger point back at you—for a long time, conservatives have been saying that entitlement and victimhood are the specialty of the left. This is how Middle Eastern dictators justify their corruption and the impoverishment of their people—the Israelis are to blame for it. This is how Robert Mugabe keeps Zimbabwe on its knees—the West is responsible. For the Russians, who want only peace and love, the Americans are to blame. If you believe in American exceptionalism, Mr. Roell, you can see: we’re not so exceptional, after all.

Beware easy answers, Mr. Roell. Anyone can pander to sentiment to cloak the painful facts: in our case, that technology and automation are responsible for far more job loss than globalization. (Perhaps we should deport Silicon Valley.) And the nuanced facts: even when globalization is to blame, to undo it means not only bringing Carrier jobs back; it means twenty-five-dollar T-shirts at the clothing store. You can’t have one without the other, as you can’t have healthy food without a high price tag. But nuance is unwelcome in our political discourse. A consideration of the whole picture—unwelcome. Unfortunately, all that’s left then are lies.

Water can be “divided and defiled, yet continues to be itself and to always go in the direction it must go.”