Joy is Resistance! (When it's Resistance)

My motivation comes from loving my life, and knowing other people deserve to love theirs, too.

I’m on my way to Denver to see Lorde at Red Rocks with some of my best friends from law school; later in the week I’ll relocate to celebrate a friend’s 30th birthday on a beach.

Meanwhile in my home city of Chicago, ICE is demanding people show their papers in random stops and fining legal residents who don’t have their papers on them. Violent disappearances continue unabated and state police assist the feds in punishing protestors as they ignore the Temporary Restraining Order entered last week barring ICE from violence against nonviolent protestors and journalists. It feels pretty fucking weird to be texting the girls’ chat about how excited I am for Lorde.¹

This is a sentiment many people share. My comments sections are full of people wondering how they can have a wedding or a birthday party or a weekend off as their neighbors are disappeared by the government. Historically, these questions might have been answered with a surface-level “joy is an act of resistance!” But many are beginning to realize that joy-as-resistance is often a tagline invoked by people who seem to be engaged in few other acts of resistance.² There’s a sneaking suspicion that perhaps we owe each other more. (We do.)

As one begins to grapple with the hypocrisy of living a privileged life within a system that preys upon so many other human beings based on little more than accidents of birth, it’s very easy to spiral.³ Embedded deep in our culture—intentionally—is a sense that it is somehow inauthentic, almost shameful, to critique a system when you are its beneficiary. It’s why so many nepo babies argue they earned their way to success, and why some politicians twist themselves into knots to find bogeyman culprits to explain away harms that are caused by the system functioning as intended. It keeps many people with privilege silent, as though it’s a bigger failing to be a little hypocritical than it is to stay inside as the secret police take children away. It’s self-centering and counterproductive.⁴ And it is ultimately not necessary. You can care about things and still have a wedding, or go to a concert. But it does matter how you go about doing those things.

My work is motivated, in large part, by a deep love for my own life. The deep and abiding belief I have in the power of community care comes from having a community that proves me right over and over again as I choose to trust them. I have high expectations for my friends and loved ones and they have high expectations for me, and in this way we make each other better and learn together. Everyone deserves a life that comes with love and learning and the ability to go to a concert sometimes. This is the world I want to build, and I know it’s possible because it’s the world in which I live.⁵ I don’t think anything good comes from disengaging entirely from the parts of my life that make me certain a better world is possible. If anything, I think doing so is a recipe for burnout and the death of motivation.

To engage ethically with joy as a privileged person in this moment does require some discomfort, though. It is right to parse through the uncomfortable, hypocritical parts of living with privilege in the United States. It’s necessary, even, because without genuine self-reflection, we can justify anything to ourselves. When I speak at law schools, I talk about the cognitive dissonance of being someone so systems-critical but choosing to spend years at Skadden Arps, doing work for corporations I don’t really think should exist at all. There was a particular trend I noticed among law school friends who entered Harvard laser-focused on public interest jobs and then decided to do corporate work for financial reasons. Their discomfort with their own hypocrisy often caused them to stop thinking about the decision seriously at all. Jokes about selling out are rampant. Commitment to pro bono work or donations to community organizations fell by the wayside as people refused to grapple with reality: yes, they had made a harmful decision. But the decision is made. Now, your job is not to let yourself off the hook. Your values don’t vanish when you make an imperfect or even harmful decision within the confines of a broken system. Your values vanish when you give them up.

Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke recently of his lack of apolitical friendships, something some might say [] is impoverishing, but I don’t think it is. I think it’s deeply enriching, actually. As someone who similarly does not have apolitical friendships, I’ve returned to this interview often. The time I spend with my friends is not exclusively focused on political discourse, which would be exhausting. But there is no one close to me in my life who fails to engage deeply with the current political moment. Time we spend together is joyful, and celebratory, and just as likely to feature long conversations about the woes of modern dating or reality television du jour as it is to feature conversations about community organizing and current events. My thinking is shaped by all of those conversations, and they are richer because I know we share certain foundational values. The love of my friends and family is what makes public-facing work possible, and I can operate knowing it will remain because the same people have stood beside me in less public-facing work. There were many practice runs.⁶

A number of people have reached out to me recently to tell me about smaller actions they are taking to build community and reject ICE in Chicago. One person had a mini-fundraiser where they delivered homemade baked goods to the first 15 people who sent them proof of donating at least $50 to ICIRR, an immigrants’ rights coalition. Two others hosted a clothing swap in their neighborhood and provided attendees with resources about anti-ICE rapid response and other community organizations. These things are joyful; little brings me more joy than homemade bread and new-used clothing with new friends. These things are also resistance, because they are rooted in a desire to build community in a meaningful way. True community is rooted in showing up for each other.

Rev. David Black, recently thrust into the spotlight after a video of ICE shooting him in the head with pepper pellets at Broadview went ultraviral, refers to the work happening in Chicago as “world-building.” This exactly-right frame comes at least in part from abolitionist and Afrofuturist thinkers,⁷ who understood the violence of the American system long before primetime news was running videos of ICE shooting pastors. As we world-build on the macro level, it is just as important to do so on the micro level. Joy-as-capitalist-consumption is not resistance. But it is an act of resistance to build a joyful life that centers liberation and community, and to live it. That kind of joy not only fits perfectly into resistance, it is inextricably linked.

1. But God, am I excited for Lorde at Red Rocks. This will be my fourth time seeing her (every tour!) and first time seeing an artist at Red Rocks, and I may just combust when Ribs comes on.

2. “If Hillary/Kamala had won we’d be at brunch right now” signs have entered the chat.

3. Addressing this feeling does not mean that it is the most urgent harm done by our system; it does not qualify at all in the Harm Olympics. That said, addressing the feeling is the only way to deal with it, and dealing with it is, in my opinion, the only way to motivate non-directly impacted people to action.

4. Another Harvard educated friend told me once as we had a conversation along these lines that he’d been discussing all of his guilt about his positioning with his therapist, who had let him go for a while and then stopped him and said, “it is sounding a bit like you found a way to make the suffering of the downtrodden about yourself,” and that take has never left me. I suspect it hasn’t left him either.

5. AOC once spoke about how the future envisioned by Defund movements is in fact the reality for many of the Americans who believe reallocation of resources from policing will not work to make people safer.

6. A post on the ways that pro-Palestinian advocacy became a test run for building trustworthy and liberatory relationships is half-drafted and may or may not make its way to you someday.

7. Recommendations for those looking for deeper engagement with concepts of abolition and Afrofuturism: this article about Ruth Wilson Gilmore, which is at least in my memory how I became acquainted with abolition, Mariame Kaba’s “We Do This ‘Til We Free Us,” Angela Davis’ “Are Prisons Obsolete?,” Octavia Butler generally but especially “Parable of the Sower” and “Parable of the Talents.”