Radical Hope Quotes

“But language is malleable, and it is not always on the side of truth. This is something every writer knows. Words make and unmake the world with terrifying rapidity, and they do so without moral distinction…There is a battle going on right now over the words we use, over who has the right to speak and who does not. (Katie Kitamura)”
― Carolina De Robertis, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“But all the fighting in the world will not help us if we do not also hope. What i'm trying to cultivate is not blind optimism or inane positivity but what the philosopher Jonathan Lear calls radical hope. "What makes this hope radical," Lear writes, "is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is." Radical hope is not so much something you have but something you practice; it demands flexibility, openness, and what Lear describes as "imaginative excellence." Radical hope is our best weapon against despair, even when despair seems justifiable; it makes the survival of the end of your world possible. Only radical hope could have imagined people like us into existence. And I believe that it will help us create a better, more loving future.”
― Junot Díaz, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“In the leadup to the 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 of 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 every to withhold naturalization purely on racial grounds.”
― Lisa See, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“I want to believe in prophecies more than policies. I want to listen to poets rather than pollsters.”
― Carolina De Robertis, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“This week I was watching the Rachel Maddow Show (you'd love her: she's funny and brilliant and just happens to be a stunning butch), and she was interviewing the outgoing attorney general, Loretta Lynch, about the country's post election future. The entire show was like a burst of hope so bright I almost had to put on sunglasses. The African American attorney general, prim and plump, sat perched on a barstool talking to a white butch lesbian who has her own national television news show! The event was being recorded in the Stonewall Inn, the site of one of the first places where queer people fought back against police violence! (I was so nervous about being a lesbian in 1969, I hid the tiny newspaper clipping from you.) Simply that the interview was happening made me remember that there are people in the world who are not such egotistical, political careerists as to believe that human rights don't matter. Then, as if just showing up wasn't enough, Attorney General Lynch spoke a truth that is hard to remember from our short-lived perspective: "History is bigger than one turn of the electoral wheel." During your eighty-eight years on this plane, you saw numerous turns of the wheel, and many of them did not land on a prize. Still, toward the end of your life, you took me in and bestowed not just a roof and clothes and food but the gift of your history and the knowledge that we find hope inside ourselves.”
― Jewelle Gomez, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“You are an ally because of your actions, not because you say you are. (Kate Schatz)”
― Carolina De Robertis, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“It is love that pushes us to face the journey toward justice without flinching, love that impels us to keep going on the long, hard road, love that provides the moral compass and the map.”
― Carolina De Robertis, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“You carried your infant daughter in one arm, and walked with me, a child six years of age, tired, trudging beside you. You left that nightmare behind. And you left behind other things, too. The elm trees that lined your street. The familiar scent of autumn. The baker's smile when he handed you the fresh bread, the song of the peddlers in the street, the sound of strangers around you talking, haggling, buying, singing, speaking, fighting in a language you understood. Your friends. Your career. Your home. Your dreams. Your family. Your memories. Pots, pans, the fine silver spoons and forks. Photographs. Heirlooms. Your favorite dresses. Your father's grave. The colorful wares of the markets at the new year. Streets you knew by name. Cab drivers who recited poetry. The halls of your old university. You left whatever you couldn't fit into a single suitcase behind you and closed the door of your home for the last time, the dishes washed, the beds made, the curtains drawn, thinking, "Perhaps, perhaps we will come back," and you shut the door, and left, without knowing if you'd ever find home again.”
― Parnaz Foroutan, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“When I was on a book tour last year, I saw a sign in a bookstore in a seaside town in Maine that was carefully drawn with popular symbols of coastal living and these words were entwined: Hope anchors the soul. From that childhood that many might call "disadvantaged," I was anchored in the belief that most things are possible.”
― Jewelle Gomez, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“Nothing changes if we just feel shitty about being White. And nothing changes if we refuse to talk about it. The opposite of white pride does not have to be white shame. We can’t push it away and pretend it’s not us. We are not color-blind, we are not post-race, we do not get to reject our whiteness because it makes us feel bad…This does not get solved with a Celebration of Diversity Day and a coexist bumper sticker. (Kate Schatz)”
― Carolina De Robertis, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“Colonial power, patriarchal power, capitalist power must always and everywhere be battled, because they never, ever quit. (Junot Diaz)”
― Carolina De Robertis, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“So let me tell you one more thing. It's something I remind myself, when confronted with hate and fear, something that I hope you keep in mind in this new era and aways. Every one of those conversations you and I have had - about being gay, being feminist, being black or being white - ended with the same question. "But why would people think that?" you asked every time, and every time, I gave you the same answer" "Because they're afraid. Because it's different from what they grew up thinking, and it's a new idea, and sometimes new things are scary." Like the first time you went swimming, I tell you, or that time you tried rock climbing, or the first time we went in a plane. You'd never done it before, and you thought it would be scary. "But then I realized it wasn't," you say, and I say, Exactly.”
― Celeste Ng, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“The other day, I told you our family motto was "Be kind, be curious, be helpful." Kindness and helpfulness you understood right away. Then you asked, "Why is curious in there?" Because being curious is admitting that you don't know, but also that you want to know. That what you don't know, is worth knowing. That people you don't know are worth knowing, that they have something to teach you. That learning about them - that encountering new ideas - doesn't threaten you, it enriches you. That what you haven't experienced is worth experiencing. That you approach the world as a trove of things to take in, rather than things you frantically, fearfully wall out. "Be kind, be curious, be helpful:" what that really means is, "stay open.”
― Celeste Ng, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“I read a postelection blog post by the great Ursula K. Le Guin that said that we should stop using the metaphors of war. We should not think in terms of enemies and battles, because such thoughts, in themselves, change who we are. We need to be like water, she wrote. Water can be "divided and defiled, yet continues to be itself and to always go in the direction it must go." The water metaphor takes me many places. It takes me to the melting Arctic ice and the rising sea levels. It takes me to the Gulf of Mexico and Deepwater Horizon. It takes me to the toxic tap water of Flint, Michigan, and Corpus Christi, Texas, and Hoosick Falls, New York. It takes me to the water cannons used against you. But it also takes me to you, oh water protectors!”
― Karen Joy Fowler, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“Pay no heed to the darkness, the open mouth of greed, the hateful speech, the walls and the guns and the men who bare their teeth at her golden doors. America is yours. Your prayers conceived her, your dreams for your children brought her into being, and your children make her what she is meant to be. They build her. Fashion her bones, sturdy her structures, make her beautiful and strong. America belongs to you, to all mothers who dream of her. So light the small flame of your heart, cup your hands around it to protect it from the savage and the storm, and walk forth into the darkness, because I tell you, that flame, that bit of light you carry, that flickering hope, that has the power to illuminate even the blackest of nights. Hold steady, walk forth, and burn with truth, with love, with compassion, burn brightly because soon, the dawn will come. To my mother, on that highway, on that endless night, when she walked toward the glow of that torch, with lighting imprisoned in her heart. To all mothers who've walked toward this light, Welcome. Home.”
― Parnaz Foroutan, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“I knew I lived in a country founded on the murder of the body and the spirit of others. Native American nations were decimated with little regret, Africans fell beneath the same juggernaut, and all of the bloodshed was aided and abetted by practitioners of Christianity who manufactured innumerable ways to glorify Manifest Destiny and slavery. The Founding Fathers thought it easier to subjugate by dehumanizing their prey; their descendants find it easier to subjugate their prey by humanizing and prioritizing corporate entities.”
― Jewelle Gomez, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“Aunt Hattie, when you wrote that book, I imagine you were thinking of something radical: the abolition of slavery itself. You were only one small woman, and you were looking up at an enormous edifice, towering and monolithic, but what you wrote made the whole structure start to tremble and shudder, and finally, it all came down, thundering and crashing. It wasn't just because of your book, of course, but your book made it impossible for people to think of slavery in the old way.”
― Roxana Robinson, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“In a climate where bigotry is an explicit value of those in institutional power, speaking love is an act of dissent.”
― Carolina De Robertis, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“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.”
― Carolina De Robertis, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“And we are the ones who made it about race in the first place—our ancestors did this by literally making race as a category, as a system to ensure hierarchies of economic, political, and social control. That we benefit from, every day. We made race, and so we need to keep making it about race.”
― Carolina De Robertis, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“Colonial power, patriarchal power, capitalist power must always and everywhere be battled, because they never, ever quit.”
― Carolina De Robertis, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“James Baldwin’s “My Dungeon Shook—Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation,”
― Carolina De Robertis, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“This is the joyous destiny of our people—to bury the arc of the moral universe so deep in justice that it will never be undone.”
― Carolina De Robertis, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“And this is a small point by comparison, but why do Republicans persist in substituting "Democrat," with its "rat" ending, when "Democratic" would be correct? Because they want us to know, in every word they speak, how much they hold us in contempt. In my lifetime, the Republicans have never accepted a Democratic president as legitimate, no matter how many people vote for him [or her.])”
― Karen Joy Fowler, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“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" - tel me if I just used a hip word correctly?”
― Mohja Kahf, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“You who came of age in the past decade have had eight years of a Black U.S. president, and that gloss looked good, and there were even a few inches gained on some issues such as health care, and maybe that can cause a person to relax a bit. But think of how exponentially drone attacks increased under Obama, how many Black people were shot by police under Obama, because the violence is systemic. How many of the people now hearteningly pledging to sign up for a Muslim registry signed up for a Black Lives Matter or protested the discriminatory immigration program NSEERS? The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System subjected my students from the Middle East to hours of interrogation and intimidation every time they reentered after going home to visit their families, arbitrarily barred tons of innocent people from entry, and was ineffective against terrorism anyway. It's systemic injustice we are after changing, and we should not ever be lulled.”
― Mohja Kahf, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“We're paying attention. All Creation is listening. Make your noise, but also remember to quiet down and distinguish the truth from illusion. Keep your chin up. You're not going back underground, but there are times you'll have to tread water. This is just another one of them. And you know how to swim. But the earth will remain. And we're not going anywhere. Remember as you walk the land your relatives prepared for you: Prepare the world as best you can for seven generations. Life is still a celebration. Trust me, Grandson. There's a reason we don't have a word for "good-bye.”
― Chip Livingston, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“Remember the balance and share as much good news as you acknowledge the bad. Spread even more good news. This trouble too shall pass. And what comes after this muddy patch is so much better, more solid, and more united in humanity than the planet has yet seen in our living history.”
― Chip Livingston, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“Despite everything they've done to us, you exist. With everything they're doing now to silence and undermine your objections and confidence, Chebon, you exist. As long as you're alive to witness and protest, you still exist. So don't get down. Instead, get up and shout. Then dance. Don't forget to stomp and dance. Feel your feet on the sand. That's your freedom.”
― Chip Livingston, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“Your blood's a testament to that long line of troubling history; it's nothing you can't handle. The president-elect of the United States in the year 2017 is not going to be what ends human life. Don't believe apocalyptic lies. There is no Armageddon.”
― Chip Livingston, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times