Doing the Hard Work With Hope

I built a life writing about racism. Here’s how I found peace in a political climate designed to test it.

I sank into despair because of increased racism and animosity during Trump’s first term, found my footing and renewed hope over the following years, and now — facing a similar political climate — have peace and hope I didn’t before.

I recognize the apparent irony that I — a contributor who researches and writes about racism — was invited to pitch in for the issue on hope. But you can do this work with hope or you can do it without hope, and there’s a massive difference. With Trump back in office, we’re in a political climate very similar to his first term, which is when I hit rock bottom — but I’m a completely different person this time around.

Rock Bottom

I was in college during Trump’s first term. At the time, people with fringe beliefs and awful prejudices were emboldened on my campus. It was an extremely hostile environment. Swastikas had to be washed off walls. In the designated “free speech zone” outside the library, retired men stood all day with megaphones, shouting prejudiced beliefs — which I felt acutely sensitive to as a Black passerby. Even when I could avoid the free speech zone, I couldn’t walk from one class to the next without encountering the “chalk wars.” The sidewalks were all chalked with words that read like brief manifestos. The next day, the vandalism would be thoroughly vandalized — until the first culprit would come back to restore their work later in the week, and the cycle would inevitably repeat. It was madness. I felt pulled under by the hostility and the futility of it all.

In an effort to cope, I grew deeply invested in politics and involved in activism. Everyone said getting involved would help with political angst. Spoiler: it didn’t help. I made no strides toward making the world a better place. Instead, I simply spent way more time learning about issues and injustices that only added to my concerns, and I sponged up defeatist attitudes from other aspiring activists. My worldview darkened, and my beliefs intensified: I felt like social progress was not only nonexistent but also impossible, and every issue felt dire. I started to see the world as “us vs. them,” viewing people who didn’t agree with me as enemies, threats to my well-being — to my safety, even.

I heard about the trend of deteriorating mental health among progressives, and I couldn’t deny that I fit the pattern, so I looked into it. I found research from social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his collaborator, lawyer and journalist Greg Lukianoff, that focused on cognitive distortions common on college campuses. These are thought patterns like emotional reasoning, overgeneralizing, and dichotomous thinking that, if practiced habitually, worsen overall well-being. As Haidt and Lukianoff explain in their book The Coddling of the American Mind, these practices are taught implicitly and explicitly in many social justice circles, which can make life feel especially hopeless and bleak for people who adopt them. They had me pegged.

Fortunately, these negative patterns can be unlearned too. Through self-guided thought evaluation in a process called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), I saw that my hopelessness — which felt like the only rational response to what was happening around me — actually had more to do with my perception than with reality. Cognitive distortions had skewed my view of things, but CBT helped me to ease out of it. As I did, my burden lightened.

Turning a Corner

I was able to change, even when my immediate context did not. I was still hustling through the free speech zone and weaving through the chalk wars while trying to not read the pavement, but I wasn’t nearly as affected by it. Facing my fears helped me conquer my fears, so I did the hard work of seeking out the viewpoints I disagreed with. I could see that many of the people who disagreed with me were not hostile like the megaphone men or prejudiced like the chalk propagandists. That humanized them and, as I came to see their beliefs as understandable rather than unfathomable, expanded my capacity for dissent. It was still hard enduring that political climate, where prejudice and political fervor were ratcheted up, but now at least I could deal with hard. Now at least hard didn’t ruin my life.

I found my footing and went on to make a career of “activism.” I became a writer focused on issues of race and equality. Along with addressing racial injustice writ large, I also wrote about progressive policies and practices that had become counterproductive — from DEI programs that were so race-conscious they separated people by race to strange social norms in social justice circles that ostracized Black people more than anything else. I mused on common progressive beliefs I’d held that, after engaging with the opposing arguments, I discovered might be wrong — maybe “impact over intent” isn’t the right way to make sense of microaggressions; maybe “seeing” someone’s race is something that can be taken too far, to the point where people are being reduced to their race; maybe treating dissent as betrayal gets in the way of our goals.

It was an earnest attempt to go about politics the right way — not adding to polarization, but calling for self-reflection. I even had a book manuscript I had been working on — offering these critiques and essentially telling progressives, “With great power comes great responsibility.” It was about to be as relevant as ever, since we were about to transition from a Biden presidency to a Harris presidency.

I think you know where this is going.

Trump was reelected. Within months of his taking office, DEI was thoroughly banned throughout the government and at any institution that receives federal funds. Clearly, all my talk of “progressive excesses” was no longer relevant, and I figured that tough-love criticism lobbed at a group without political or cultural power wouldn’t exactly land.

My manuscript expired in an instant. I was in denial at first. Not obstinate denial — naive denial. I just couldn’t believe that antiracism and DEI would go from being fully accepted as public goods to being largely outlawed. I was unsure of how to proceed. For the previous four years, I had grounded my message in optimism. I long believed that because progressives had political and cultural power, our primary responsibility was to examine our own pitfalls and errors; we just needed to correct certain beliefs and practices. Focusing on what we could change became a moral stance for me. But now our beliefs didn’t really seem to matter, and our practices didn’t just need some tweaking. They were dead on arrival.

The Same, But Different

With Trump back in office and an anti-DEI agenda being executed much more decisively this time, I could see clearly how far I’ve come — being back in a similar situation made my personal change all the more evident. I had hope and peace this time around, even amid political hostility. The onslaught of drastic changes had me confused and hesitant at first, but not despairing.

Though I questioned my path forward, I decided to stay the course, offering clear-eyed commentary on what I believed would create a better kind of antiracism. I’m dusting off and reworking the manuscript as we speak. Now, more than ever, we need nuanced takes on race and social justice. You have enough people telling you to fear your friends, hate your enemies, worry about what’s ahead. And that isn’t exactly helping any of us face the day — that kind of negative and dichotomous thinking sent me spiraling in my first foray with “activism.”

That’s why I’m still sharing the well-rounded education that I believe is needed in the antiracism space. It might not shock or hook people as well as ragebait, but it’s better for them. It can keep them grounded and form them into deep thinkers rather than group thinkers. It can help them understand and converse with the people in their life, even if they disagree. It can teach and move them to do whatever is in their power to do.

At the very least, I’m helping the people who are trying to help people. I’m caring for the people who care about people. These days, that’s my master plan for making the world a better place.

That’s my story of hope.

I often point out that I found hope along the way, but I didn’t have to abandon the heavy topic of racism to maintain that hope. I didn’t have to retreat to an easier or more upbeat subject matter. I could come back to the same hard and needed work, day after day, anchored in truth. I could be a witness for others who might feel more like I did years ago, or who think that activism needs to run on desperation and anxiety. It doesn’t. I can say with certainty that hope is the better fuel.