No Time For Blind Optimism

I am told that I am pessimistic. I am not.

I am secretly optimistic about the things that I can control. Why? Because the things which lie within my ability to control are personal. They are me-things.

They bend and bow when I need them to. I know where I want them to go and, best of all, I know how to get them to my intended destination.

I have bottomless positivity about how much pleasure I will get from reading a book I have chosen, or the clarity which comes from spending a few minutes of a day in silence.

I know, for example, that when I set my mind to something I will see it through to conclusion, that when I compile a gym routine I will grunt and stumble through it until I get it right.

It is the things beyond my control and power that I am cynical about.

The pizza could be badly prepared, delivered late, or the wrong order—or all three; the book I am reading could turn out to be unrewarding; and a neighbour might decide that five o’clock in the morning is the best time to test-drive their new speaker system with the latest heavy metal album.

These are other people things. I have no say in them, they just happen.

That is where the cynicism comes in – other people and their things, encroaching upon or rubbing against my things.

As much as possible, I try to be civil about them, and deal with them as best as I can. But I cannot for the life of me be co-opted into blind optimism.

This is something that Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Atlantic correspondent, famous for his long-form critiques of race relations in the United States, share—we are positive about the things that we believe and hold dear, but we are not willing to buy into the illusion that everything is okay.

They are not. Just the other day the so-called leader of the free world became a racist, xenophobic bigot. Where did he get the social capital to ascend to such a position?

Not from me to be sure. He got it from other people. In Europe, the Far Right continue to harangue the world with their false teachings, fooling it with their careful rebranding of fascism. Other people, not me, gave them the means to peddle their vileness.

And while watching Hidden Figures (which is brilliant, by the way) I watched all of the exclusion and travesties committed against blackness and thought about how little in the world had changed when it came to marginalising black excellence.

Again, not my doing. Other people’s. I cannot be called a pessimist simply because spades are spades, and race remains a constructed and pernicious fact of life.

Nay, I am optimistic about the things I do as a black man trying to add value to the world. I just cannot be blindly optimistic that other people will do the same, not when there is clear proof to the contrary.

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