“We Know It’s a Library”: Black Space, Black Women’s Labor, and Radical Black Joy

• In Event: You Can’t Steal My Joy! Practices and Possibilities for Black Joy in Urban Education

Abstract

Research shows that Black teachers enact fugitive pedagogies in their classrooms to reduce the psychic, epistemological, and physical suffering of their Black students (Givens, 2021; McKinney de Royston, et. al, 2021). One example of a space that seeks to nurture Black youths’ psychic, epistemological, and physical well-being is the Junior Scholars Program (JSP). JSP, a nickname affectionately given to a program by students and staff of an out-of-school program housed at the Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture, in Harlem, a library and repository for information on African ascendant peoples. Black joy is not just a preoccupation of Black life at JSP; it is a birthright (Dunn & Love, 2020). Author 1 is a former JSP instructor and Author 2 is the Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture's education manager. In this article, the authors (re)member their work at JSP and the effort it takes to maintain Black joy in a world that is overwhelmingly anti-Black. The authors use BlackCrit (Dumas & ross, 2016) and radical Black feminism (James, 1999) as lenses to examine the labor that is required to maintain Black joy, as well as the importance of Black women's care work in fostering Black joy beyond containment. The authors end with a call for radical Black joy that resists commodification and Black resilience in the face of neoliberalism (Clay, 2019).

Authors

• Damaris C. Dunn, Drexel University

• Kadiatou Tubman, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture