They didn't have dreams of speaking other's language. As I stood amid a sea of mostly young black faces at New Revelation Baptist, I found myself seeking my own new revelation by asking hard questions about what has become a dangerously mundane ritual around young black bodies. Many of us have had the experience of being annoyed at a coworker, but then going to the company picnic, having a beer and a laugh together, and forgetting our annoyance. Black Joy as an Act of Resistance Erica Lasan (Photo: Robert Carter) Erica Lasan BS'09 (Metro) Joy Strategist By Kenna Caprio Erica Lasan, BS'09 (Metro), deals in joy. And there's something very powerful about a womb of joy that nurtures and helps constitute identity. Joy is an Act of Resistance Chapter Leadership Brief 2.10.2023. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); The Aesthetics of Joy is a resource for finding more joy in life and work backed by scientific research. Thanks so much for sharing. Like water, we mostly follow the path of least resistance., I had no real communication with anyone at the time, so I was totally dependent on God. Rest is vital, but rest alone doesnt create resilience. We'd invite you to bring that same joy in supporting this work. Prolonged states of heightened negative emotion raise blood pressure, cortisol, and respiration rate, putting stress on the cardiovascular system. Amid the devastating stresses of a prison so inhumane its being closed, These gardens help repair the damage that people have been through, both in prison and in their earlier lives. says landscape architect Amy Lindemuth They are quiet places to be alone with your thoughts away from the cacophony and stress of the prison environment.. They smooth tensions and break down barriers. Wa-ching! Come and join me and my colleagues on the AFP NYC IDEA Committee where we not only embrace inclusion, diversity, equity and access but we further these ideals within the Fundraising profession through planning, collaboration, implementation, and of courseJoy. Willie Jennings: Public rituals bound to real space. In his poem, A Brief for the Defense, he writes: If we deny our happiness, resist satisfaction,we lessen the importance of their deprivation.We must risk delight. Joy is also a manifestation of abundance. Aesthetics of joy can also disrupt complacency, drawing much-needed attention to a cause. Jesus tells us to use joy as an act of rebellion when he says: "Love your enemy, bless the one who curses you, do something wonderful for the one who hates you, and respond to the very ones who persecute you by praying for them." (Matthew 5:44) Share joy by sharing love, which drives out fear, which leads to joy. "For Black folks, joy and resistance aren't really that separate," Waheed tells me over Zoom. Maya Angelou is a very good inspiration, especially for African American women, saying that she could rise above nations. This is great! And the clear example I'm drawing on is African diaspora communities in which there's a reality of joy built inside the forced segregation. How was she coping? We need it as much as we need anger because it is joy that will help keep us in. One of the ways it does this is by affirming our humanity. Choir singers heart rates synchronize; musicians playing the same riff have brain waves that line up. Christopher McCandless It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge. You've come into a space that is not your own, and in some ways that space has claimed you as its own. Sometimes people in the coffee shop offer to help me out, even though I tell them they dont have to, but when they do help I say to them, Hey, on fried chicken day, I got you.. The Joyspotters Guide is a free resource that shares my favorite tips for finding more joy, everywhere you go! So it's not the badness of that family's vision of joy against the goodness of something else, but it is the opening up of that family's vision of joy. Every year African American History month has a new theme. This is slightly embarrassing, but when talking about womens empowerment the first people that come to mind for me are actually the Spice Girls. "The path of least resistance is what makes rivers run crooked." - Elbert Hubbard. The feeling that you get when you have told the right story to the right person at the right time is nirvana. Chair IDEA Committee Communal joy provides a kind of glue that unifies a group. These experiences of synchrony create a physiological experience of community, one that can be profoundly unconscious. We see kids and adults of color being attacked everyday for just living their lives. To make injustice the onlymeasure of our attention is to praise the Devil. And there are so many silences to be broken.". Folk or traditional music is typically condemned, such as in Nazi Germany, which targeted Jewish music. Willie Jennings: To press even further, it could be that one thing under utilized by Christian intellectuals is precisely this latter reality that Jesus himself points us toward, a family that becomes reconfigure. "You were not just born to center your entire existence on work and labor. For his anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime. Joy is an act of resistance. To laugh in the face of fear is possibly the bravest act, which is why Saffiyah Khan became an instant hero in the United Kingdom when she smiled at fascist thugs from the far-right, racist movement English Defence League who began harassing Muslim women in her hometown. is one of the defining moments in modern punk and, with any justice, will stand as a testament to the working classes of the world and prove that new rock music is still being produced that can reach into your chest, tear out your heart-and then give you a great big hug that makes you feel like everything might . I see the outcome of their efforts now that Im older. The only problem in your life is your mind's resistance to life as it unfolds. Rosa and Maya inspire me in my work. $grfb.init.done(function() { Black joy is, and always has been, an act of resistance. Miroslav Volf: So if you have a kind of cultural logic that sets patterns for expressions of joy, but it ends up being segregated joy, how do you break open out of the enclosure? Released on Partisan Records 31/08/18 1 X LP, includes digital download card Joy As An Act Of Resistance is a parade. And how do we nurture hope? We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world." ", The commercialization of joy in the empire of advertisingcontrasting that with the peoples serious work of joy, The work and skill of making something beautiful out of what has been thrown away, Segregated joyjoy in African diaspora communities, Joy is always embedded in community logics, Geographies of joy: Christians tend not to think spatially, but we should, Hoping for joyous infection, where the space has claimed you as its own, Where can joy be found? The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. Maybe they didn't intend it, but it did. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too., Most gun control arguments miss the point. It is mind-boggling to them that Black people can still find peace. Studies show, for example, that feeling joyful can mitigate something called the own-race face bias, where people tend to recognize differences in faces of their own race while failing to distinguish faces of other races from one another. Your joy is an act of resistance. The hooting spreads among the group, and the chimps begin to hug and kiss each other, with friendly body contact increasing as much as a hundredfold. For activists, who live with chronic stress, the risk of burnout is physiological. The album was a huge critical & commercial success, peaking in the UK Albums Chart at No. C.S. Its a mass movement. Even in the rebellious punk rock subculture, misogyny was rampant. How on earth is anyone to find solace in the midst of such overwhelming grief? I want our guests to know that I love them and appreciate them. He is the author of the Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, as well as his most recent book After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging.Jennings' joy is not for the faint of heart, the fair-weather friend, or a life of ease. } AFP NYC Board Member. (44.15) All of the Handmaids at this posting (Glen's) are called Ofglen (of Glen). One of the challenges of activism is that the fights are long, the progress often slow, and the effort required thankless and grueling. Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto. - C.S. And that's what's key, the kind of mapping of joy that would be necessary to actually start to think about the reconstituting of a different reality of joy. I also like, as I love to say, I'm making productive use of pain and suffering in the absurd, not in order to take them lightly, but to take them very seriously, but not to make them gods. Joy as an Act of Resistance., an Album by Idles. We must walk a path of joy even against our doom. Now that feels a bit closer to home in this era, a desire for something long ago, far away, about to be. When people have worked to build entire systems to break you, they are angry that you still can have joy. That feeling is the perfect combination of knowledge, experience, skill, luck, and magic called Fundraising. Willie Jennings: Yeah. I loved your book, and this post really lifted my spirits. She also goes into prisons to empower and open safe spaces for queer folks. Joy is the currency that is flowing between hands in such situation. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. $22. Willie Jennings: Despair in all of the ways that despair wants to drive us toward death, and wants to make death the final word. They moved the needle forward by challenging stereotypes in a very aggressive and sometimes shocking manner, forcing important gender issues to the forefront while demanding equality in how women were seen and treated. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. "Oh, the Spirit's coming." I grew up in such a situationlearning how to have a good time with nothing because we had nothing. Willie Jennings joins Miroslav Volf to discuss the definition of joy as an act of resistance against despair, the counterintuitive nature of cultivating joy in the midst of suffering, the commercialization of joy in Western culture, joy segregated by racism and slavery, how Jesus expands and corrects our understanding of joy. And so the question becomes for me: can there be a form of joy that helps to constitute identity that happens in the in-between, in the gathering of different peoples? History month and why rewriting history to exclude the African American's place in it is so perfidious, its founder said it best, "If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the . Within the imperialist white supremacist capitalist cis-heteropatriarchy, we generate joy by defying dominator culture. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don't like. By Crystal Fields-Sam Chair IDEA Committee . It is a parade of naivety, of a warm embrace, it is Young Thug's dress. Seeing her and PARCES gives me hope for Colombias future. I think that's the first thing you have to have. "Joy does not simply happen to us. At one level, it is tied to real spaces and places. You have to have people who have been able to make you laugh in the places where all you want to do is cry. On the other hand, the novel shows that even in her fearful passivity, Offred does manage to resist her oppressors in the small ways that are available to her. The whole community sits down to enjoy the feast, with even the lowest-ranking chimps getting to enjoy the treat. Miroslav Volf: Thank you very much, Professor Jennings. We've been taught that silence would . Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. I get to have all that no matter how ugly things look. 330 Ellis St., San Francisco, CA 94102 | info@glide.org. John Keats Your success and happiness lies in you. It certainly wasnt my intent to include negatively pointed thoughts, so its good for me to know that this is how it felt to you. Willie Jennings: My pleasure, Dr. Volf. Im so, so glad to hear it resonated with you! Fundraising is the vehicle a worthy cause utilizes to traverse obstacles which would otherwise prevent it from being heard. Stories that matter delivered to your inbox. We produce new episode every Saturday, and you can subscribe through any podcast app. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave., You see, the point is that the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone., Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Without that belief, theres no point in fighting. In 1915, Dr. Carter Godwin Woodson, Alexander L. Jackson, William B. Hartgrove, George Cleveland Hall, and James E. Stamps told their story and changed the world by founding what has become Black History Month. And there's something very powerful about that because as one artist says, "It's how, especially oppressed in poor people, can make something really beautiful out of what has been thrown away." Growing up in the 90s, they were really my first exposure to feminism (lite) with the idea of Girl Power and that women could do anything despite what others thought or expected. But for those two minutes we turned that cemetery from a place of death and mourning into a place of life and honor. Join our email list for theological and cultural commentary, educational resources, and more. And death in this regard is not simply the end of life, but it's death in all its signatures: death, violence, war, debtall the ways in which life can be strangled, and presented to us as not worth living. At all points in the fight for equality for Black Americans, women have been driving the movement. Report; Shocked that the man would trade something so essential to his survival, Wiesel asked him, Hanukkah in Auschwitz? And the man replied, Especially in Auschwitz.. Their mission is to protect and support the dignity of marginalized individuals and communities. You are also agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. These women have shown me what strength, determination, compassion and accountability look like and taught me to not take no s**t from anybody (lol)! Reclaiming those sources of joy is a way to refuse to be dehumanized, to reassert our vitality.