Fellow white Christians, our hope is flabby.
This pandemic has tested the resilience of our hope, and we’ve come up lacking. Remember when people hoped this might end by Easter of 2020? The past year brought a litany of crushed hopes—schools reopening by fall, jobs resuming, that loved ones’ health be spared, that this could all just be over.
And part of what hurt so much through this all was learning how to deal with unmet hopes. For white people especially, I am convinced that our hopes are often built on the expectation that things will continue as they always have, which for us is generally pretty good. We assume things will turn out fine because in our narrow vision of the world things always seem to turn out fine. We believe that good opportunities always arise, that technology solves all problems, and that good people get good lives. Scratch beneath the surface, and what we call hope is a cover for optimism built on the intentionally blinkered worldview afforded us by centuries of stealing opportunities, ignoring inequities, and believing in our own manifest destiny.