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? How lucky to have met him. Willie Jennings: Well, practically you have to have people who you've heard sing those songs in strange lands. When people have worked to build entire systems to break you, they are angry that you still can have joy. It cannot., Humanism is the only - I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history., People don't resist change. Music is a common one. "Go find your joy. How on earth is anyone to find solace in the midst of such overwhelming grief? Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Hi Ingrid, I am a musician and Ive been creating music and performances that bring joy and also have an activist/educational component. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email. She resisted violence and oppression by asserting her existence and that of those around her. There were incredible women like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth before the end of Slavery, the women making lunches and marching during the Civil Rights Movement, and the women of the Black Panthers supporting the social programs and keeping the organization running. Report; Let us know what you're interested in. That's what's necessary. Not enjoyment. Joy in that regard is a work that can become a state that can become a way of life. Release Calendar Top 250 Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Movie News India Movie Spotlight. It is counter-intuitive in that regard. Professor Jennings, it's great to have you with us. This is slightly embarrassing, but when talking about womens empowerment the first people that come to mind for me are actually the Spice Girls. Three weeks ago today, on Friday June 9, hundreds of family members, friends, and well wishers packed into the New Revelation Baptist Church to pay their last respects to Darius Smith, a 15-year-old child who was killed by an off-duty customs agent in Arcadia, California. This exposure to the idea that girls are just as powerful and important as the boys next to them is how we continue to resist oppression and advance womens rights. Cal State Fullerton African American studies professor Mei-Ling Malone explains: "Black joy is an act of resistance. Miroslav Volf: Things are going to be better. I met Jack Gilbert a couple of times. In context where your energies have to be focused on survival, it doesn't leave a lot of energy for overt forms of complaint. Willie, wonderful to have a conversation with you about joy. By Crystal Fields-Sam No. If you need to flag this entry as abusive. 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. Recognize that pleasure is a measure of freedom, writes Adrienne Maree Brown, author of a book called Pleasure Activism, which takes as its premise that the states of being that activists are striving for, justice and liberation and wellbeing, are highly joyful states, and therefore pleasure can be a powerful tool for helping us achieve them. One of the ways it does this is by affirming our humanity. If all control boils fundamentally to force, how can one resist aggression without equal force? When Im in the coffee house [GLIDEs dining room reserved for families, the elderly and the physically disabled] and people are sitting there still hungry, I dont rush them out or ask them to leave. My pleasure. What would that space look like for you? The legacy of the Morrill Act is not only our great colleges and universities like Rutgers but the American tradition that merit and not money should give people a chance for a higher education. Its a mass movement. In 2017, they formed the Resistance Revival Chorus, a collective of women and non-binary singers whose central tenet is that joy is an act of resistance. Rest Is Resistance Quotes Showing 1-30 of 84. He provides a perfectly painted picture that shows the pain, joy, and triumph of resistance. In a nation that denied our humanity, surrounded by neighbors who harbored hate for us in their hearts, our futures and our children's futures have perpetually been kept under the boot of the police state, our lives snatched away by a cop's pistol or the smack of a judge's gavel. To choose joy is to say that regardless of years of systemic oppression, unfair disadvantages, and everything life may try to throw your way, in the words of the late Maya Angelou - "Still I Rise.". Sojourner Truth, a suffragette, a fighter for womens rights during and after slavery time, said thefollowing: I will not allow the light of my life to be determined by the darkness around me. I find that quote to be so powerful for today, and for me. None of us want to be the rich people on the Titanic, sipping champagne in black tie while the water rises. And as if nobody there missed a beat, Ms. Myricks, and everybody there knew that it was time to dance in his honor. ("Joy of the Sabbath") and founded by historian Emanuel Ringelblum (1900-44). It's a parade of my Grandfather's wit, it is all the shit haircuts I've ever had. IDLES War T-Shirt. Anne K. Ream is the founder of The Voices and Faces Project, a global storytelling project, the author of "Lived Though This: Listening to Sexual Violence Survivors," and a Founding Co-Chair at World Without Exploitation, the national coalition to end human trafficking and sexual exploitation. Stepping back and taking in the Womens Marches around the world has almost been overwhelming. Their mission is to protect and support the dignity of marginalized individuals and communities. When I think about strong, courageous women passionately working to advance social justice, which inherently means theyre fighting oppression every day, I think of my good friend Catalina Correa Salazar. But, there's also the goodness of the joy that transcends, that reach us out, that includes the other people, and music is one of the spaces where that can happen. We'd invite you to bring that same joy in supporting this work. Audre Lorde sums this idea up this clearly in her 1978 essay, The Uses of the Erotic, In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. She goes on to point out that this has often been marshaled in patriarchal societies for the oppression of women. But isn't difficulty, suffering, hardshiparen't these necessary conditions for joy to even take place? We don't think spatially as we should. Stop. And we know thatand my own experience in churches is that that's often what happens, a kind of infection of joy. Research shows that small bursts of positive emotion can help reset the bodys physical responses to stress, so that people can continue to fight from a place of wellbeing and strength. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning. We're passionate about making this work consistently accessible to people who are genuinely concerned about the viability of faith in a world racked with division, contested views about what it means to be human, and what it means to live life well. Is this a way of living a right life in the false one, to use Adorno's phrase? 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. Every year African American History month has a new theme. At EL Education's 2022 National Conference: A World of Good, Sydney joined school counselor Dominique Sawyer and fellow SAC members Stephanie Kacou and Marissa Barnwell for a panel . It goes against everything that racism was designed to do. Thank you! I look at joy as an act of resistance against despair and its forces, all the forces of despair. Studies show that even when strangers move or vocalize together, they become more generous, more altruistic, and more willing to sacrifice their own needs for the good of the group. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. Brutalism Tracklist T-Shirt. 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 . Remember. Joy - An Act of Resistance (Podcast Episode 2019) Quotes on IMDb: Memorable quotes and exchanges from movies, TV series and more. Im so, so glad to hear it resonated with you! Photo by Maria Baranova. 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. AFP NYC Board Member. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words., Where there is power, there is resistance., It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end., People get used to anything. You were an accessory. This year the theme is resistance. We also need moments of release and celebration to mark the small victories and restore body and mind. Lewis famously wrote in his autobiography, Surprised By Joy, "All joy reminds it is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away, or still about to be." 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. The lizard brain is hungry, scared, angry, and horny. $j("#generalRegPrompt").hide(); Joy is Resistance - by Austin Channing Brown Joy is Resistance It's easy to feel like only the big stuff matters, but resistance to injustice is sometimes about pool, cake, and dancing. We're talking about people entering a space and in some very powerful way that we can't really chart out specifically. The ones who are yours. We are proud to share this second installment of reflections in our Womens History Month series honoring womens roles in resisting oppression and advancing social justice. a piece on the power of the garden at Rikers Island. One of the challenges of activism is that the fights are long, the progress often slow, and the effort required thankless and grueling. And the Yale Center for Faith and Culture conducted a three-year study of joy and its connection to the good life. "But eventually you will find you return to your original behavior and attitudes. C.S. While communal joy represents an outright danger to a repressive regime, individual joy can also empower resistance. Put yourself in the way of beauty." In the Gospel of John, Jesus explains that the very point and the purpose of his teachings on love and keeping his commands are "so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.". Your joy is an act of resistance. Communal joy provides a kind of glue that unifies a group. Miroslav Volf: What is joy for you as a theologian, as a church men, as a black man? So did the divine right of kings. Play. Every morning, you wake up, and your mind tells you it's too early, and your body tells you you're a little too sore, but you've got to look deep within yourself and know what you want and what you're striving for." Hope is an elusive yet vital ingredient for activism. GLIDE remains deeply committed to the struggle for gender equality. I dont know what she meant when she said that, but I know for me it means that I still get to have my joy, my laughter, my sassiness, my thinking, my love of people. by FANTANAMOBAY. This talk will give viewers a bird's eye view into what it means to be Black, millennial, and socially conscious. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. We relive the same ritual again, and again, and again. Joy is the serious business of Heaven. Willie Jennings: I like singing a song in a strange land. Since then, my ideas on empowerment and the Womens Rights Movement have definitely changed, but I still believe it is incredibly important for young girls to have strong female role models early in life. Part of HuffPost Black Voices. But in context where that isn't fully, hasn't fully taken hold, the people's work of creating joy is there. UK & US. "Our joy in itself is an act of . Following the success of their debut album Brutalism, the band started recording new material for their next album. Sensory joy is a form of care that contrasts with traumatic circumstances and helps cultivate the resilience needed to counter oppression. This inexplicable power to dance in the midst of mourning is not to be smugly dismissed, as has many suggest, as some sort of slave religion or momentary hyper-spiritualized pie in the sky delusion. Rosa Parks stood up for her rightsshe actually didnt let the bus driver tell her what to do or abide by those rules and regulations about where she could sitshe fought for justice, and thats why African Americans are now able to sit in the front of the bus at this moment. Local authorities often forbade or disrupted native rites, or at minimum made relinquishing them a condition of conversion. So, simply put, joy can be considered resistance because its a form of energy for change, as Lorde puts it. Dr. Engram's "Black Joy as an Act of Resistance" takes the listener on a journey through the life of Black millennials. But the emotion, the phenomenon, the virtue, the state, whatever joy is, it resists definition: different from happiness, and pleasure, and positivity, often out of our control, often present in the most surprising circumstances. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too., Most gun control arguments miss the point. Lorde uses the word erotic, meaning a form of deep, sensual (not necessarily sexual) pleasure, but I think you could easily use the word joy if it makes more sense to you: Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama., Ive talked a lot about the joy of communal celebration, but we can also find it in nature. The more dehumanizing the circumstances, the more we need these markers of our humanity. Ethologists have observed chimpanzees celebrating the arrival of a caretaker delivering a bunch of blackberry vines, a favored food, to their enclosure. So somebody can walk into a space that have been marked by joy. I want our guests to know that I love them and appreciate them. "Find ecstasy in life: the mere sense of living is joy enough." Emily Dickinson 2. Resistance creates suffering. Lee's grandaughter, Dione Sims, who is also a civil rights advocate, has been helping her in the . Last week I attended a dinner party inspired by Marsha P. (P for pay-it-no-mind) Johnson, who ignited the Stonewall Rebellion. "The path of least resistance is what makes rivers run crooked." - Elbert Hubbard. You were born to heal, to grow, to be of service to yourself and community, to practice, to experiment, to create, to have space, to dream, and to connect.". Willie Jennings: Despair in all of the ways that despair wants to drive us toward death, and wants to make death the final word. "You were not just born to center your entire existence on work and labor. We rely on the generosity of individuals like you to make our work possible. Wa-ching! "Resistance is the secret of joy." Alice Walker 20. "Oh, the Spirit's coming." And I think at another level, the work of joy becomes serious work, which I think in our contextand by our context, I mean in the Westthe work of joy in many ways is not fully the people's work. And not every church I've been is a space of joy. } else { 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.