Impossible futures and the ethics of hopelessness: learnings from Black liberation system entanglements part III

Black Liberation work focuses on the flourishing of people of African descent across interconnected life components-community, health, education, employment, nutrition, and housing. Because these components are porous, connected systems, Black Liberation and social justice work are projects of system Futures. Yet what justice workers can or cannot imagine is deeply entangled with our experience as parts of these wounded systems. The resilience of systems of injustice has produced a future orientation of Afropessimism and Afronihilism within the African diaspora. White or Eurocentric Futures and design employ an ethics of hope that does not work for communities without hope, making these dominant paradigms exclusive. Futures has always been practiced by communities since the beginning of human and ecological life, especially by oppressed and decolonial movements. Viewing Futures as a spiritual practice, this paper uses a Black Liberation theology lens, informed by intersectional liberation theologies, to critique White Futures practice and its ethics of hope. This paper then presents how Black and underutilized communities that include people without hope practice futurism through an ethics of hopelessness founded in Impossible Futures. Rather than using impossibility as a euphemism or temporary state, Black Liberation and social justice workers mean it literally-a future that will never happen. This practice is called Black Liberation Futures Design, one contextualized glimpse of pluriversal Futures practices. This paper also makes a methodological argument for sociological research on race. Dominant Futures methodologies embed epistemological assumptions-about hope, agency, and linear temporality-that function as hidden scholastic bias, reproducing the racial hierarchies they claim to study or disrupt. Drawing on standpoint theory, Black Liberation theology, and lived experience, this paper shows how researcher positionality and the categories embedded in research practice shape what knowledge about race and racialization becomes possible. Black Liberation Futures Design offers sociology a reflexive, community-rooted methodological alternative for studying race, temporality, and structural oppression.