Conceptualizing Black Unspeakable Joy

• In Event: Conceptualizing Black Consciousness Within Motivation Research

Abstract

“Say Her Name!” “I Can’t Breathe!” “No Justice, No Peace!” #BlackLivesMatter are all noted demands herald by activists across a variety of platforms that signify an immediate need for racial justice within the United States. Simultaneously, there are demonstrations and movements that signify an immediate need for racial justice and equity but through means that focus on Black beauty, Black creativity, Black art, Black play, Black achievement, Black families, and Black love. Though vastly different approaches to activism, both forms of advocacy fight for and promulgate the liberation of Black people, Black culture, and Black existence from anti-Black oppression that attempts to homogenize, render invisible, and constrain Black bodies and the Black experience.
Given that contemporary conceptions of Black began with the transatlantic slave trade (Hartman, 2007), Blackness has always existed in a space of duality (e.g., DuBois, 1903b)–being both written and unwritten, spoken and unspoken (McKittrick, 2014). McKittrick (2014) notes that the spoken and written perspectives of Blackness reflect that of the slave ledger, a telling of Black life and stories rooted in trauma and oppression where Black is deemed as the opposite of human. Borrowing from this theorizing, we note the written and spoken forms of Blackness account for the pathological, deficient-oriented, race essential narratives of Black people that have been promulgated through research in the psychological sciences (ABPsi, 2021), including educational psychology and motivation research (Graham, 1994; Matthews & López, 2020). The unwritten, the unspoken, thus reflect perspectives of Blackness from Black onto-epistemologies that present Black people a fully human and able to engage all aspects of life including love, happiness, peace, and joy.
From a sociopoltical position of disrupting hegemonic, homogenous, Black = traumatic experiences only, in this paper we lean into Blackness that is unspoken to conceptualize Black Unspeakable Joy. Black Unspeakable Joy is a metacognitive praxis employed towards liberation from anti-Blackness. As a metacognitive praxis, Black Unspeakable Joy stems from Black people’s awareness of their various social and material conditions and their refusal to allow those conditions to have complete control over their social, psychological, and physical well-being. To operationalize Black Unspeakable Joy, we offer a re-scripting of historical and contemporary cases documenting Black life, attending to what could have been unwritten and unspoken regarding the context, the noted behaviors and presumed motivation behind these behaviors. We then present a model for noticing and examining Black Unspeakable Joy within motivation research, methodologically and analytically, implicating the need to research Black life, motivation, and outcomes from a perspective that honors the full humanity of Black people operating within anti-Black structures.

Authors

• Terrell R Morton, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Isaiah M. Stewart, University of Illinois at Chicago