From Barrels of Laughter to Laughing Out Loud: How Black Joy Honors Our Ancestors

Black joy has always been a tool of both resistance and healing. Unlike the common shared human experience of joy, Black Joy is unique to Black people in that Black joy is interwoven within the Black experience.

“When joy is Black, it is a radical demonstration of our humanity,” Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts says in her book Black Joy: Stories of Resistance, Resilience, and Restoration. “our laughter…set in a cultural context and struggle specific to our experiences as members of the African Diaspora.”

While joy and laughter seem like light topics, historically speaking, they were seen as, at best, a nuisance, and at worse, a weapon. And when even Black joy is weaponized, Black People never viewed as unarmed or innocent.

To this very day, our joy is policed.

This can be seen in the 2015 story of the Black Women’s book club who were forced from a Napa Valley vintage trip after other passengers allegedly complained they were “laughing too loudly”. (They later won a discrimination lawsuit against the company, which had them laughing all the way to the bank).

It can also be seen in the 2019 story of four 12-year-old Black and Latina girls in Binghamton, New York, were forcibly strip searched by white officials at their middle school because they were laughing after leaving the school cafeteria during their lunch hour for “suspicion of drug use”. (They too have a lawsuit, however currently it is pending).

Stories like these are too common. Our people are punished or penalized, in one way or another for, of all things, our expressions of joy. Our laughter, like our lives, for no other reason than anti-blackness, has been deemed in need of policing.

“They’re always trying to quiet us down, turn us down.” Adreinne Waheed, photographer and author of the book Black Joy in Resistance said in a recent interview in Vogue. “They tell us ‘you’re too loud’ or ‘you’re too bright’. However, those things are attached to our joy, our very being, and it is how we exist as full humans.”

This can be best seen in the almost forgotten history of the “laughing barrels”.