To combat antiblackness in academic forums, we prefer to embrace black queer joy as an example of ‘the fact that objects can and do resist’

You know, I think that joy is not a feeling that one inhabits. Joy is a disposition. It is a kind of mood that one must work daily to affirm and attempt to inhabit. Growing up, I remember hearing a lot about joy in sorrow, which seems to be deeply contradictory. How could one have what we presume to be a simple feeling? I think that is an imprecision, it’s a misunderstanding of what I understand the saints to have meant and mean when they talk about having joy. Which is not primarily an ephemeral feeling that is fleeting and goes away. It is actually a kind fundamental recognition that the simplicity of our breath and our being and our becoming is itself celebratory. Joy as the desire to cultivate or to really attempt to be tender with our fragility as human creatures. Joy for me is the recognition of that complexity and the desire for a kind of posture that is about letting that complexity happen.

I think that academia, if we’re going to think about it as a kind of institution that has a set of practices, is deeply worried about joy and Black joy. Because it is a kind of force that recognizes the terribleness with which we exist, that the terribleness is not part of an existential dilemma, but it is a creation, and I know lots of my theologian friends would probably disagree with me on this point. I say it’s not an existential dilemma only insofar as the dread that we are supposed to feel—about being overtaken by police, for example, and violently acted upon, because we are trans or we are queer, or we are all of that and also Black—that the dread that we are supposed to feel is not actually the dread of the fact of your existence and breath. It is a dread that is produced, because of a political economic context, under which existence has to be negotiated.

I think that institutions become very wary of something called Black joy because within the context of this terribleness called anti-Black racism, that we still figure out a capacity for breath, being, and becoming that is really, really tender and loving and kind.

You don’t have to presume that you must escape your fragility and your vulnerability to live a human and joyful life. But I think that the rules of the political economy and the deep individuation process that so many attempt to go through means that we misrecognize what vulnerability and fragility actually is. You know Disability Studies is one of the places that helps us to stop thinking of weaknesses as thing that is like a problem that you must overcome. It’s just a call to be in relation. How can I be in relation to you, without giving up the thing that you think of me that causes me to be weak?

Persaud:

Yeah, there’s something you just said there. One time, I was talking with sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom, and she said something to me that sort of changed my life. Which was that all Black people are social theorists. It came up because I told her that I decided not to pursue a PhD in Sociology, given the ways that the discipline is much rigid in terms of what “counts” compared to say Communication which is much more capacious. But that phrase always kind of stuck with me, and by extension I would say especially for Black queer people like us, Black transgender people, I think it speaks to your point about the capacity to imagine a world otherwise, to be in relation with each other, to foreground joy in a world that otherwise doesn’t want us to have it.

I’m actually thinking about Lil Nas X now, and sort of the ways that he just reacts to people trying to tear him down by spinning it into a joke or something cool. He’s just doing what many Black queer people have always done with what the world has given us. Especially in the context of Instagram, Twitter, and these other commercial social media platforms that ultimately are sort of inextricable from the racial capitalistic alienating structures that animate our world right now. I think that what people like Lil Nas X and many otherwise unnamed Black queer cultural producers do, and what we do, materializes joy as an approach, as a practice, and as a methodology.

Crawley:

As you know, I’ve written a little about him. You know I actually believe that we should abolish celebrity culture, I think it’s terrible for so many different kinds of reasons, the way that people really, really over identify with their favorite celebrities. It does so much damage because it ends up being a moral claim about the righteousness of individuals that disallows any kind of critical engagement. But I like thinking with Lil Nas X because of what he compels us and others to narrate. It goes back to this Fred Moten quote that I alluded to but didn’t state from In The Break. “The history of blackness is a testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.” He goes on to say that what goes unremarked is how an object exerts a dispossessive force on the one who is attempting to possess it. And it is for me really important, necessary, and urgent to think about the resistance of the dispossessive force that object actually produces.

So I think of Lil Nas X as an object, whereby I don’t think of objectifying conceptually as a negative thing, because I’m not using it that way. I’m talking about subject–object relations. Like you know I’m thinking about that terrible little rapper interviewed recently with The Breakfast Club, Boosie or whatever. All of these comments, every single time, all of these comments about Lil Nas X . . .

Persaud:

Let me guess, something about the Black family being destroyed and our children are being corrupted. I feel like that’s always what these people come up with.

Crawley:

Yeah, that’s what he said. And I don’t actually care about what the content of what he’s saying. What actually is interesting to me and intriguing to me is that it’s very clear that he is bothered. And I don’t just mean a kind of simplistic being bothered. For this person, I mean that his essential paradigm for what he thinks is possible is being undone. Lil Nas X isn’t the only one who does this to people, but he’s one of the most public ones. It’s evident that Lil Nas X challenges what he thinks is actually possible in the world.