In this article, I argue that the current literature on political hope overlooks its non-instrumental value. By proposing a Kant-inspired account of treating reasonable hopes as fundamental hopes, I argue that it is rational for people to hold certain political hopes not only because such hopes promote particular ends but also because they are constitutive of a person’s practical identity as a responsible political agent with limited power to make changes. This view reveals that victims of injustice face an affective injustice because the unjust social system forces them to face a double bind in upholding their fundamental political hopes.

After the overthrow of Jim Crow and the reelection of our first Black president, how should we conceptualize the tasks of a racially progressive politics in the United States? I address this question through (1) the lens of recent philosophical work on the relation between narrative and the justification of political hope and (2) a comparison of two autobiographies, Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn. In light of this comparison, the paper also evaluates some recent contributions to the American Political Science subfield of American Political Development.