Join us on a cross-country adventure of Black Joy. Along this journey, we pause to create and hold spaces for learning about what brings Black people joy. In this space of endarkened* educational and emotional enrichment, we share our findings as a tool to #Blacktivate new narratives regarding the Black experience. Welcome to the State of Black Joy!!
The adventure begins in California…
Next, we journey to Oregon…
Finally, we end our Pacific Coast adventure in Washington…
*Endarkened is a term borrowed from the academic work of Dr. Cynthia Dillard and her “endarkened feminist epistemology” framework.
This framework honors the wisdom created within and among Black people. It pushes against the traditional, White, patriarchal, heteronormative ways of knowledge creation and dissemination. Furthermore, this framework explores the experiences of Black people with a particular focus on Black women.
Within the permission granted by Dr. Dillard’s groundbreaking work, we build this page, The State of Black Joy, as an open access tool to provide a counter narrative to the typical deficit lens that is generally applied to research involving Black people as well as typical media portrayals of the Black experience.
Dillard, C. B., & Bell, C. (2011). CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Endarkened Feminism and Sacred Praxis: Troubling (Auto) Ethnography through Critical Engagements with African Indigenous Knowledges. Counterpoints, 379, 337–349. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42980906
