#PettyPendergrass

it is literally one of my favorite sermons ever because of the way she sounds, the way she utilizes her voice, the way the congregation is *with her* - how they are entangled in antiphonal relation with her ...

i love the sermon because it is such a blackpentecostal event - the sound, the noise, the fervor, the intensity, the use of volume, the use of pace - everything in it is really quite amazing.

i love the sermon. and i tell people all of the time that can't nobody tell me anything bad about iona locke because i love her. i enjoy her. she makes me happy, the way she performs preaching.

but i am very clear. my enjoyment of her sermonizing, my happiness with the way she preaches, is not *joy* ... it is not *black joy* ... it is not that which will sustain communities through terror, trauma and that which exists previous to antiblack racism.

i can quote pretty much the entire sermon. i'm listening and doing it now.

in one part of the sermon she says: "come out from them junky saints. come away from that junky lifestyle. get away from that wishy washy thinking. why i got to look at you and wonder if you male or female?!" the congregation says, loudly, "WOOOOOOOOOOO!" in response.

that line - that completely homophobic, transphobic and misogynistic line - brought the congregation happiness, they enjoyed that line, they were pleased with it.

can we critique this flagrant homophobia, transphobia, misogyny? or will it be said that we don't want people to enjoy things? because the way people talk these days, any critique is considered a denunciation of people's joy, of black joy.

and i'm sorry but no.

happiness, pleasure, enjoyment are not always and only ever radical or good or right or moral or ethical. sometimes, that happiness and pleasure and enjoyment emerges from structures of inequity and violence. full stop.

i love the sermon. i love bishop iona locke. i do not think, however, that there is some simplistic, apolitical "joy" that black people can or should perform as if it's some kind of property that can be owned.

and one of the ways people talk about "black joy" is by a really reductionist and paternalistic relation to black working class life. what do i mean?

i mean: 1) people tend to treat black working class life as *simple* and *simplistic* 2) people treat this simple and simplistic life as merely aesthetic, as merely about the form or the clothes or the way folks dance or cook or "speak slang"

3) thus they think there is no intellectual content in black life 4) such that, because of no intellectual content, there is no dissidence, no disagreement, no discussion, no resistance, internal to black social life, particularly black working class life

so all these calls for letting people "have black joy" that are predicated upon not ever critiquing, interrogating, questioning - it seems to me at least - are deeply paternalistic, fetishistic and reductionist.

these calls that think of black joy as simple and simplistic that cannot handle dissidence or dissent pretty much imply "those people aren't intellectual enough to get it, let them be happy..." and. no.

i write a lot about joy. wrote an entire chapter in a book about noise and joy and blackness. and i find it deeply troubling the way the concept "black joy" is invoked over and over and over again to disallow any engagement in critique, any questioning of structures of inequity.

black joy ain't some shit to name in order to foreclose the possibility of engagement.

and black joy, it seems to me, has to be in the service of the flourishing of all life, the practice of expanding imaginative possibilities for living, and the production of relational density.

when black joy gets invoked in order to have us aspire towards becoming or being complicit with structures of inequity, when the concept is used to have us desire celebrity and its celebration, interrogation is needed.

this does not mean you cannot like or love or get pleasure from things that are full of complexity and contradiction. it means that you take seriously the ability to think that "regular people" (whoever that is supposed to mark) can and do think complexly.

lots of folks talking about "letting" people "have" "black joy" disdain the intricacies and contradictions and complexities and dissidence and disagreement internal to black working class life while simultaneously wanting to speak *for* everyone. i'm good on that bullshit.

i told yall about my visit to the barbershop a couple of weeks ago. there was lots of happiness and pleasure and laughter being had through the homophobia, sexism and classism. should we "let them have their black joy"...? what would that even mean?

we gotta interrogate the global political economy. and we gotta interrogate celebrity. because we're out here thinking any and everything is the practice of black joy and that just can't be the case.

fin.

oh, lastly: joy is a practice, it is a posture, it is a way of life. it is not property that you own. black joy is against the practice of private property.

the saints sing: this joy that i have the world didn't give it to me, the world can't take it away. so i do get hella confused when people think that joy immediately goes away if others don't like the thing you like. you ain't have joy but a desire for coercive celebration.

imma get joy from steve reich's music for 18 musicians whether you enjoy it or like it or think it's too simple or too intricate, or not.