Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement
By Brandon M. Terry
Belknap, 560 pages, $35
When we talk about politics, certain names and phrases serve as navigational buoys, allowing us to make our way through uncertain and often turbulent waters. Adolf Hitler and Nazis are bad. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement are good. Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and Kim Jong Un are bad; Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, and Anne Frank are good. While this conversational strategy can become a cliché—Godwin’s law forecasts that every argument on the internet will turn toward Hitler and Nazis—appealing to paradigm cases of good and evil is a natural part of how we reason together, and those examples guide us through the murkiness of the world, even when they go unspoken.
But appealing to the moral clarity offered by such examples contains a curious asymmetry. We are much more willing to contextualize and complicate examples that point to goodness than those that point to badness. It is off-limits to say Hitler might have had one or two good ideas; it is perfectly acceptable, and even expected, to say that King made some missteps. Perhaps this says something about our culture’s reluctance to countenance goodness and truth without qualification, leaving evil to guide us—evil no longer understood, in its classical sense, as a lack of goodness, but as an adamantine reality.
Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope is Brandon Terry’s attempt to offer an account of the civil rights movement that avoids both the inclination to ascribe a single, pure moral meaning to a paradigmatic person and the instinct to contextualize and complicate until paradigms are rendered useless. Terry worries that the liberal establishment takes an overly simplistic view of the civil rights movement, telling romantic stories about its goodness that produce reverence rather than motivating political engagement. Meanwhile, an emerging current of black political thought demystifies the civil rights movement, insisting on the permanence of anti-black racism and, in a different way, turning its back on political engagement. The solution, Terry argues, is to develop a “tragic” stance toward the civil rights movement, appreciating its contingencies and complications, but also its motivating power.