Editor’s note: As people of different faiths continue to celebrate new life and the joy it brings, this week’s guest author offers a compelling and challenging view of Joy.  My friend, anti-racist educator and activist A. Adar Ayira, shares her experience as an African-American woman of embracing joy in a community context based on awareness and recognition of racism in America and the struggles over time and today by African-Americans to overcome racism.  Adar is a founding member of Baltimore Racial Justice Action and the founder of Ayira Core Concepts LLC. 

When U.S.-born Black people speak, write, commune on the topic of JOY with similar backgrounded strangers, family, and friends, our conversations share a common societal overlay: the magic of BLACK JOY; that Joy that is legacy and heritage born of pain, hope, struggle, and impossible odds. The conversation is bound in that context, as it is this history that Black people tend to reference and in which we tend to anchor our Joy.

As I began writing this article, I realized that the context for this topic is different, based on race. And that is because Joy is contextualised according to the histories and legacies of our racial groups, and their cultural contexts in the U.S.

When Joy is discussed in multi-racial groups, discussions are usually focused on individualized experiences of Joy without the racialized societal context or cultural overlay. The prevailing overlay is “unity” — the commonality of individual experiences as unifying factors. Since November 2024, white individuals involved in Joy conversations seem to emphasize this commonality, letting it serve as a reinforcer that they have not and are not associated with “MAGA.” It serves as an “I am one of you,” without any explicit acknowledgement of or conversations about the racialized societal context we are in.

Black people especially are well aware of how the U.S. came to this societal moment: aware that the majority of white voters who voted, voted for the person who ran a campaign on white supremacist ideology, promising open codification of white advantage again; aware that Black people have been warning for years about not only him, but those in power who openly supported white supremacist ideology; aware that white people still gave these individuals the benefit of the doubt; aware that more white people are awakening now because they are afraid that they will also be negatively impacted by what voters of their majority have unleashed on the rest of us.

Multi-racial group conversations about maintaining Joy are often devoid of this context, often ignoring that it is because of the above, that Joy is needed even more. Engaging in these conversations in multi-racial groups without the context of how the country arrived here might be a “feel good” moment for white participants, but it will also be a moment devoid of the deep, deep history of shared societal context that occurs when Black people discuss Joy. Discussing Joy from an individual perspective – the perspective encouraged in U.S. individualistic and fragmented culture — does not anchor individuals, groups, or movements.

When white people discuss Joy, if they are not willing to see themselves in the conversation from a racialized group perspective, the conversation becomes just another feel good moment of faux racialized unity disconnected from the larger racialized context. It becomes yet another moment that supports their notion of themselves as individual good white people, but does little to build, sustain, or anchor anything long-lasting or transcendent outside of that moment.

When Black people discuss Joy within our racial group, centering the conversation within that larger context connects us – even those who were previously strangers – to our shared history of struggle and overcoming; reminds us that we are not alone but are linked with those who came before us, who are here now, and who will come in the future; anchors us in the racialized historical and cultural circumstances that we face; provides us with roadmaps of learning to continue on, to overcome, and to laugh and heal through the hardships of the journey.

Black people recognize, share, and receive Joy not just as an individual feeling but as a communal one strong enough to build and sustain movements and to bind people together to better face all that comes. Black Joy is our strength and our anchor.

Writing about or discussing Joy without acknowledging the history or the context feels too “all lives matter”-ish when lived experience tells me – tells Black people — that it is everything but. Black Joy comes from a place of Legacy and Bequeathed Gifts passed down generation to generation from Black Ancestors. I write and speak about Black Joy from the privilege of observance of a lifetime of examples of Black people who have gritted their teeth from pain and turned that into laughter and Joy, despite living in a society determined to break them in every way possible. Joy is a communal and cultural anchor that we can access at any time; it is one that propels us through.

For Joy to be experienced as a communal anchor, white people will have to move from the individualistic into the racialized collective of their U.S. history. This move into the cultural and communal will seed more honest multi-racial connections toward Joy that serves as a collective anchor for us all.