Melissa Harris Perry: I'm Melissa Harris Perry in for Tanzina Vega, and this is The Takeaway. All right, a little story. Last summer my family and I, we knew we were really lucky because in the midst of a deadly global pandemic, we had a home, jobs we could do remotely and secure health insurance. Also, rather incredibly, we had a brilliant millennial with an elementary education degree who had just rented our guesthouse. Under these circumstances, I definitely didn't feel like I could do a lot of quarantine complaining. Still, like so many others, our crew felt isolated.

We felt the loss of long anticipated moments like that moment when my eldest daughter graduated high school in our living room. All of us spiralled with grief and rage when Breonna Taylor was killed in her own bed, and Ahmaud Arbery was hunted and shot and when George Floyd was murdered in broad daylight. Facing a summer last summer without camps or travel or even play dates, I knew I had to do something to counter this world of illness, death and loss that was threatening to consume us, and that is when I launched our family's Black joy camp. Together our family-

James: James.

Parker: Parker.

Anna: Anna.

Melissa Harris Perry: -Melissa, created a 10-week plan to get us through the summer. We focused on topics like sports stories, art, music, science, robotics, and yes, social change. Again, it's our first day of camp, and we're doing sports today, remember? What is the theme of our camp?

Anna: Black Joy.

Melissa Harris Perry: Again, what is joy mean to you?

Anna: Love, peace and happiness.

Melissa Harris Perry: Our sports camp where we're going to have love, peace and happiness, one of the things we have to have is healthy bodies. Healthy bodies that do fun things, so today we're going to stretch, we're going to run. We're going to drink some water. We read books about Mae Jemison, Shirley Chisholm, and Simone Biles. We memorized Nikki Giovanni poetry and learned how to spot a Basquiat painting. Brianna led our Black girl yoga every morning and my daughters had parent free sister time every afternoon.

[music]

Melissa Harris Perry: For music week we listened to Ella Fitzgerald.

Anna: I know a music song.

Melissa Harris Perry: Tell me a music song.

Anna: A duet.

[music]

Melissa Harris Perry: Well, you don't sound like Ella Fitzgerald, that's for sure.

Anna: I was doing a duet.

Melissa Harris Perry: Do you remember what Ella Fitzgerald said? "Accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative."

Anna: Yes.

Melissa Harris Perry: What did that mean?

Anna: Good things bigger, bad things smaller.

Melissa Harris Perry: You got it. During feel good week, we got intentional about loving the beautiful Black selves we see in the mirror. What about your face? What do you see when you look at Anna's face?

Anna: It looks beautiful.

Melissa Harris Perry: It does? I think so too. Do you love yourself? How much?

Anna: 100%.

Melissa Harris Perry: Grandpa Perry led a zoom session about James Weldon Johnson and cousin Chris taught us basketball moves virtually. We made vision boards and we wrote our very own storybook, it was called Cupcake's Birthday.

Badia Ahad-Legardy: They jump on the trampoline, and on the slide. Cupcake goes first because she is a birthday girl.

Melissa Harris Perry: We walked barefoot in the grass, chalked the driveway and every single day we consciously cultivated joy. How do you practice Black joy? Give us a call. The number is 877-869-8253 or you can send a voice memo to takeawaycallers@gmail.com Now I'm happy to welcome Badia Ahad-Legardy. She's professor and Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs at Loyola University, Chicago. She's also the author of Afro Nostalgia, Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture. Badia, welcome to the show.

Badia Ahad-Legardy: Thank you for having me.

Melissa Harris Perry: Now, I was raised in a Black Southern tradition that distinguished between joy and happiness. Do you make this distinction?

Badia Ahad-Legardy: I see them rather synonymously I have to say, but joy is something that I think is really broad and especially when we think about Black Joy, I like to link it to the psychological. That might be the distinction that I make. Happiness is more emotional feeling and joy, I think, is really tied to the psychological.

Melissa Harris Perry: I spent a lot of time last night in this book, in Afro nostalgia. I loved how you articulated these critical ideas about nostalgia and joy, and particularly how they connect with contemporary Black experiences and historical ones. Make that connection for our listeners. What is that connection between the nostalgia and joy?

Badia Ahad-Legardy: Nostalgia has enjoyed a rather recent renaissance, especially in psychology. What a lot of recent studies have found is that nostalgia is really crucial to cultivating joy. It's a emotion that encourages feelings of belonging, it contributes to feelings of self worth. It gives us a sense of hope and optimism for the future, which is really interesting because usually people think about nostalgia in terms of the past. Really, nostalgia does a lot in the way of giving us a sense of possibility for what lies ahead. It also promotes feelings of joy and self esteem.

Melissa Harris Perry: I kept thinking the two things that created such collective joy in the context of the quarantine for COVID-19 was club quarantine, where suddenly we realized not only do we need to be together, but we needed to be together in this musically nostalgic way. Then also Versus, right? Which brings back all the old groups to battle each other sonically. I just thought, "There it is. There's Black nostalgia and Black joy together."

Badia Ahad-Legardy: Yes, absolutely. I think what's really important about that is to pay attention to the creative process, right? Really, Black people doing what we've always done in really difficult circumstances, which is to create, to be in community to cultivate joy. I think that those examples that you just named are perfect.

Melissa: One of the other things that it seems you're seeking to do with this text is to unlink the idea that Black memory is always about trauma. How do we connect our memories, particularly our collective memories of trauma, so many of which were reproduced in this difficult year, and yet also the idea of nostalgia and of memory being a space of joy and happiness?

Badia Ahad-Legardy: Sure. I would certainly never suggest that we ignore the harsh realities of the moment. Certainly, the circumstances of the past, especially that narrative of trauma that I think we know so well. I think it's also really important to be mindful that there are other aspects of Black life that allow us to cope with those difficult moments and really withstand those difficult circumstances. For me, Black joy really functions as a form of resistance, and it's really central to our own survivability.

Melissa Harris Perry: All right, so let's talk about some specific aspects of Black joy. Practices, things we can do. What is the Nap Ministry?

Badia Ahad-Legardy: Well, the Nap Ministry, so Tricia Hersey is the founder and self proclaimed Bishop of the Nap Ministry. She's a visual artist, but I would say that she's so much more than that. She's someone who basically suggests that because African Americans, our enslaved ancestors were robbed of their ability to sleep at will and thus deprived of their ability to dream, that as a form of reparations contemporary Black folks should actually really embrace rest and leisure and pleasure and all the things that our enslaved ancestors were denied. That is her ministry, and she does a wonderful job of creating spaces of rest and restoration for everyone, but particularly for African Americans.

Melissa Harris Perry: It's funny when I first encountered that thought, I was like, "Of any form of resistance, I can surely do this." Then it turns out it's quite a bit harder than I expected, that being intentional about resting is maybe the thing I'm least good at.

Badia Ahad-Legardy: I think it is. Especially just with so much going on and so much that has gone on, especially within the past year, it's been very difficult to attempt to even escape the just bustle of the day and all of the series of news events, especially the negative news events that come across our social media feeds and our radios and our televisions on a daily basis. It's also so central, I think, to be very intentional about self-care in these moments. I love seeing the renaissance of Audre Lorde and promoting self-care as a form of resistance. It's not something that we should take for granted, but it's something that we should take ownership of.

I think that's really at the core of Hersey's work as well. I've actually really loved watching other people engage in acts of joy. That's been a source of joy for me as well.

Melissa Harris Perry: Tell me about that.

Badia Ahad-Legardy: I was just thinking about how I'm on social media a lot, I have to say. Probably more than I should be. I'm on Instagram, and I love seeing Eve Ewing, who's a scholar that I just really admire, she's on Instagram baking bread. I've recently started following Alexis Nicole, and she's a Black forger, and she does things like candy pine cones, and make scones out of dandelions and things like that. It's just so fascinating to watch people really be creative and really be out in the world and just doing the things that they enjoy and that they love. That really brings me joy as well.

Full disclosure, I'm a golfer and the weather's finally turned nice in Chicago. I've been doing a lot of that. It's always nice watching Troy Mullins, who's one of my favorite golfers, one of the few Black women golfers, really do her thing on the circuit. That's been fun to watch, too.

Melissa Harris Perry: In that moment, you were so incredibly generous, thinking about your own joy connected to these experiences of just watching others in their moment of joy. One of the things I must say I loved about the book was that you also talk about the affective power of the petty. I must say, I do get a little bit of joy from hanging out in petty corner. What do you mean by the affective power of the petty, especially as we're looking back historically?

Badia Ahad-Legardy: Sure. That chapter is really about the ways in which, it's really about historical novels of slavery, right? How contemporary writers have attempted to enact justice through literature for their enslaved ancestors, I would say. What's really powerful to me in those texts is that not every act of resistance was about fighting back physically, or running away from the plantation, so to speak, but really about paying attention to the emotional slights or the ways in which people were deceptive. I think Angela Davis actually talks about this a little bit in one of her essays, that sometimes enslaved people practiced resistance by just slowing down their work pace, or doing certain things to just resist their contemporary circumstances. That's what I linked to the petty in that particular chapter.

Melissa Harris Perry: With so much pain and trauma, with so much partisan division, what do you say to people who think that joy is simply too frivolous for the time?

Badia Ahad-Legardy: Well, I think back to something that my mother would always say to me, which is, "Don't let other people steal your joy." What she meant by that, I think, was that is something that is really mine to hold on to, it's mine to claim. It's important to keep it and to hold it dear. The way I see it, just for myself, an operative in Black culture, is that it really is an expression of freedom. It's an expression of one's sense of agency, of being fully in possession of your psychological and emotional life. That's something that we shouldn't take for granted.

It's not to deny the traumatic circumstances of the past and of the present, but it's also really important to claim ownership of your whole self and that includes being a person who experiences positive emotions, of which joy is an important one.

Melissa Harris Perry: Badia Ahad-Legardy is an associate professor and Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs at Loyola University, Chicago. Now, we always want to hear from you. Give us a call, and leave us a message telling us what does Black joy mean to you? Where do you find it? Our number is 877-869-8253. Again, that's 877-869-8253.

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