Content area
Full Text
"What is astonishing is that through all the suffering the dark body endures, there is joy, Black joy."
—Bettina Love, We Want to Do More than Survive, p. 15
"Joy" does not often emerge in research about Black students' experiences attending historically White institutions of higher education (HWIs).1 Many of the concepts integral to positive college outcomes—including sense of belonging (Strayhorn, 2012), mattering (Schlossberg, 1989), sense of engagement (Quaye et al., 2019), and a welcoming campus climate (Harper & Hurtado, 2007)—are related to students' joy. In this article, I suggest that joy is shaped by race and specifically examine the notion of Black joy at HWIs.
From photo books (Waheed, 2018) to social media projects (Jackson, 2017) to podcasts ("The Black Joy Mixtape," n.d.) to the hashtag #BlackJoy captioning pictures of Black people having a good time, the idea of Black joy has been articulated in various forms. I was motivated, in part, to explore Black joy because of such projects. Yet, this work also has scholarly import—literature on Black life in higher education, especially at HWIs, has little to say about Black collegians' positive emotions and experiences. Given the permanence of racism in society (Bell, 1992) and the legacy of domination Black people continue to endure (e.g., Bertocchi & Dimico, 2012; Darity & Mullen, 2020; Horne, 2018), Black joy is necessary. Despite the consequences of systemic racial domination, Black people live. To be sure, joy, and Black joy in particular, is much more than what I will highlight here. Black joy involves resistance, love, feeling seen, and the feeling of being Black and free (e.g., Dillard, 2019; Love, 2019). My aim is modest in that I only explore Black joy at an HWI as it relates to Black students' recreation and celebration. This article explores the concept of Black joy in two ways: 1) a conceptual discussion of Black joy in the HWI context and 2) an analysis of interviews with Black students at an HWI. In so doing, I identify structures that might facilitate or inhibit Black joy on campus. In what follows, I provide a conceptual framework of how I understand Black joy at HWIs.
Understanding Black Joy
A study of Black joy at an HWI contributes to the...