Brittany Packnett Instagram – the @nytimes said “Joy is not a strategy.” I beg to differ.
It’s easy to believe Joy isn’t strategic when you’ve never had to use it in battle.
Joy is not the only strategy—but it is an essential one. And if you think it’s not, you just not be properly studying Black women.
You dismiss joy because you dismiss us. You allow your confusion as to how we have survived and thrived through what you could never bear to take joy out of the equation when we never do.
We are wise and rooted enough to know that this thing we have called joy—the world didn’t give it to us, and the world can’t take it away. So we hold on to it, daring you to steal it and defying your rules that we must deny it.
Joy keeps spirits strong. Joy keeps soldiers marching. Joy sees hope in darkness. Joy finds light in community. Joy makes you independent of perfect circumstances and dependent on faith and works. Joy makes you keep working for the yes after a million no’s.
You think Joy can’t exist in desperate circumstances—and you’d be wrong. Because Joy is the medicine that makes us well. Its contradiction makes it a powerful antidote. It binds together the late nights and early mornings and righteous anger and productive frustration and community repair and intensity of the moment and together births the things that heal us.
Not a political party. Not a single candidate. Not even an electoral victory.
It births the new chapters that we dare to write ourselves. Through our struggles and tears, our troubles and triumphs, our disappointment and our victories, J O Y in what has become and what will be because we make it so: that is what J O Y brings.
I am so grateful to every single person who made a taxing week full of visible and invisible work for 5011 different jobs that pay and don’t, for me, a reclamation of the J O Y I have in the P R I V I L E G E of spending my days thinking of and working for the people, in the great and diverse lineage of Black womanhood, in the spirit of justice through and beyond systems.
J O Y in the battle—because the battle continues. #DNC2024 | Posted on 26/Aug/2024 22:03:33
