In the face of the biggest shock of 2016 — Donald Trump becoming the next U.S. president — people need to hold on to “radical hope,” Dominican-American Pulitzer Prize-winning author and creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Junot Diaz said Monday.
The prominent professor said the first step in dealing with Trump’s unexpected victory was indulging in the “necessary work of mourning. We organize. We form solidarities. And, yes: we fight. To be heard. To be safe. To be free,” Diaz wrote in the New Yorker magazine.
“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 but what the philosopher Jonathan Lear calls radical hope.”
Diaz went on to explain Lear’s definition of radical hope, saying “it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is.”
He said that such hope would be the only way to face the impossible feeling of those who have been fighting for years and now are faced with this significant setback.
“But I believe that, once the shock settles, faith and energy will return. Because let’s be real: we always knew this shit wasn’t going to be easy. Colonial power, patriarchal power, capitalist power must always and everywhere be battled, because they never, ever quit,” he added.
Diaz sought to bring some urgently needed positivity to the discussion after saying that his own students were weeping in his first class after the elections. He stressed that radical hope “is not so much something you have but something you practice; it demands flexibility, openness, and what Lear describes as “imaginative excellence.”
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He concluded with recalling the struggles of “our ancestors” who “were owned and bred like animals” and yet “transformed the universe” with very little. “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.”
Trump’s victory has sent shockwaves across the U.S. as thousands of people have taken to the streets of cities across the country since Wednesday to protest the real estate billionaire's presidency.
He has already promised to deport more than 3 million people, while also appointing well-known anti-abortion and white nationalist figures to key positions in his cabinet.