Hope Is a Weapon: On Refusing the Carrot While Still in the Cage

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about hope—what it offers, what it costs, and most importantly, who it serves.

There’s a version of hope that circulates in the social justice world, often presented by tidy, well-meaning white women on an upward career trajectory. You know the type. They build profiles off the backs of those they call disadvantaged—turning us into their projects or subjects. Either will do, as long as it helps them appear more compassionate, more progressive, more hireable.

This version of hope is transactional. It’s neatly packaged and politically safe. It’s about inspiring others, often through the suffering of people they’ll never truly stand beside. This is not hope as resistance—it’s hope as branding.

But I’ve also been thinking about the kind of hope that criminalised people are forced to cling to in moments of deep powerlessness. And I’ve been thinking about how that hope can be weaponised.

Professor Chelsea Watego’s words echo in my mind constantly: “Fuck hope.” In her book, Another Day in the Colony, she doesn't reject hope out of cynicism or despair, but as a deliberate act of sovereignty. Watego argues that hope, as it’s often handed down to First Nations people in this country, is not a gift—it’s a delay tactic. It keeps us waiting for a justice that’s never coming, from death making systems that were never designed for us to survive.

Hope, she says, is not empowering—it’s a pacifier. A way to keep us compliant while the violence continues. Because the colonial state has never imagined Indigenous people as having a future. We are problems to be managed, pathologies to be studied, or threats to be locked up. Under these terms, “hope” simply becomes a demand for our patience while they sharpen their tools of harm.

Watego’s rejection of hope is not a surrender, but a refusal. It’s a call to stop performing for the institutions that cage us. It’s a stance that says: we don’t need your validation to live free. Sovereignty is not something to be granted. It is something we enact—on our own terms, in our own time, with or without your permission.

So, when I reflect on what it means to reject hope, I think about what that looks like for criminalised people—for those of us who know firsthand how hope is used to control.

This week I was reminded of that in a yarn with some criminalised women. They had just come from a conversation with an uncriminalised, so called “well meaning” white woman who was trying to manipulate them. She was selling hope as a currency. “The conversations you have today,” she told them, “might lead to change down the track. For example, maybe child protection will hear you and shift their thinking.”

It was classic emotional coercion—the dangling of a maybe, a someday, a what-if. The use of children as a bargaining chip. The weaponisation of hope.

And here’s the thing: criminalised women know this pattern. We know what it’s like to have hope used against us. We are constantly told to be hopeful—hopeful we’ll progress through the system, hopeful we’ll get parole, hopeful we’ll be granted small “privileges.” Hope becomes the mechanism of discipline. They feed us just enough of it to keep us in line.

This is how the system works. Hope is the carrot they dangle while they hold the stick behind their backs. And the “rewards” we’re encouraged to strive for? They’re not freedoms. They’re temporary, conditional concessions—visits with our children, a phone call, maybe a better job inside. We’re made to perform for hope. We learn the lines. We follow the rules. We smile through it. Or we don’t—and we’re punished.

And those who peddle this hope? They are not harmless. The “hope hustlers” are often the most violent of all. They package our pain into opportunities for themselves—grant applications, industry awards, media moments, academic papers, social media careers. They build platforms off our backs, off our vulnerability, off our unpaid labour. They exploit our stories not to shift power, but to climb higher within it. Their hope is not about change; it’s about control. And it is dressed up in the language of care.

Our responses to this kind of violence vary, depending on where we are in our journeys. Some of us have reached the point where we can say it outright: fuck your spoonful of hope. Some still swallow it, not because they believe it, but because it feels safer—because standing up feels too risky, or because they’ve been trained too well to perform. And others have swallowed the Kool-Aid entirely, bought into the logic of the false prophets, and now peddle that same hope to those around them. Then there are those—like my sisters—who smile politely, nod along, and bank that fucked-up offering of hope like it’s a drug. We’ll snort it later, laugh at the absurdity of it all, and laugh even harder at the peddler who thought we couldn’t see right through her.

But no matter how we respond, the fact remains: hope holds power. It keeps us suspended—on edge, just close enough to believe, just far enough to never grasp it. We are kept in a permanent state of waiting. Of bargaining. Of dreaming small.

And I’m tired.

Tired of being cut on the shards of hope.

Tired of being expected to believe in a system that was built to break us.

Tired of people weaponising our dreams to serve their own narratives.

It’s time that we, as criminalised people, name this for what it truly is: hope is not healing. It is harm dressed as care. It is control disguised as kindness. It is a leash used to keep us compliant, a mechanism of manipulation that serves the system, not us. Hope is one of the prison’s most effective tools—because it doesn’t need bars to keep us in line. It teaches us to wait, to perform, to settle. It keeps us chasing crumbs while calling it transformation.

So maybe it’s not about reforming hope or reshaping it. Maybe, like Professor Chelsea Watego, we abandon it altogether. I know that’s a hard premise. Because when you’re inside, it can feel like hope is all you have.

But it’s not.

Hope is not all that we have—we have each other. We have our truth. Our resistance. Our stories. Our rage. And above all, we have ourselves. Contrary to what the prison tells us, we are not broken, empty things in need of saving or redeeming or correcting. We are whole. Our worth is inherent. We are deserving of love, of freedom, of tenderness and joy—no matter who we are, who we’ve been, or what we’ve done.

They will try to convince us otherwise.

They will keep dangling the carrot of redemption, of rehabilitation, of approval.

They’ll say the only way out is through their version of hope—through obedience, through compliance, through performance.

But my beautiful sisters:

you do not need to light their candle of hope.

You do not need to be warmed by their flames.

Because the fire was always in you.In your belly.

In your heart.

In your spirit.

And they cannot dim it without your permission.

We don’t need their hope to survive.

We’ve already been building something stronger: each other.

Not hope as they define it—

But power.

Community.

Sovereignty.

Love without condition, and life without apology.

Fuck Hope. Seize Power.