23 Things Black People Can Do To Cultivate Joy

1. Focus on black joy, not black pain and suffering. Share images and stories about black love and black joy and black creativity and black success, not black death.

2. Delete people from Facebook the second they post anything that belittles the death of black bodies or roundly upholds the police. Don’t engage with the comments.

3. Black joy is always showing you are living.

4. Find black joy by loving your black ass self.

5. Enjoy your younger nieces, nephews, cousins, children, and teach them your version of the world. Teach them to celebrate joy.

6. Celebrate black creativity, imagination and innovation.

7. Support black artists so they can keep making work.

8. Black joy is calling your friends and gossiping for hours.

9. Waste no time trying to educate white people about why black lives matter. Don’t even have the conversation. It’s not our job to cater to white people, to make a case, to convince them why our humanity matters. Black lives, black humanity is not actually up for discussion.

10. Surround yourself with people who are woke.

11. Be around black people. Start a party or a reading group or a poetry slam or an open mic night or a comedy night or a cooking class in your city.

12. Share and tell others about uplifting stories of black happiness.

13. Look SNATCHED on Instagram.

14. Go to Afropunk and be snatched there, too.

15. Read More Brilliant Than The Sun by Kwodo Eshun.

16. Go out dancing until the wee hours of the morning, posing and prancing and being sickening.

17. Walk everywhere like you’re on a runway.

18. Black joy is about resisting images of black death.

19. Black joy is about loving our uniquely black practices as an act of self love.

20. Black joy is good moooooorning, bitch!

21. Black joy is creating your own personal, socio-cultural, media and visual space in the face of white supremacy.

22. Black joy is not about white people.

23. Black joy is about loving your fabulous black self.