Education Quote by Charles W. Chesnutt

“Impossibilities” is one of those words that pretends to be neutral while doing political work. Chesnutt, a Black American novelist writing in the post-Reconstruction era, treats it less as a fact of nature than as a social tactic: the label you slap on a demand when you’re invested in keeping the world as it is. His sentence splits the so-called impossible into two categories, and the pivot is damning. Some things are “impossible” because we haven’t learned how yet: ignorance, limited tools, untested imagination. That’s the optimistic half, a bet on human ingenuity.

Then comes the knife turn: “or which we do not wish to happen.” Here Chesnutt indicts willful obstruction, the kind that masquerades as realism. It’s not that change can’t occur; it’s that someone powerful enough would rather it didn’t. In the context of Chesnutt’s career - chronicling the color line, racial passing, and the legal fictions of equality - “impossibility” reads like a euphemism for entrenched interests. Integration, justice, even basic citizenship were routinely framed as impractical dreams, not because the mechanisms were unknowable, but because the consequences threatened existing hierarchies.

The line works because it exposes “common sense” as a curated emotion: fear dressed up as logic. Chesnutt doesn’t romanticize progress; he anatomizes resistance. By making the impossible a choice as much as a condition, he hands responsibility back to the speaker. If you’re calling something impossible, he suggests, we should ask what you’re protecting - and what you’re refusing to learn.