On any given day, social media can easily rob one’s joy with a flood of traumatizing images and depressing news. Afro-Latinx poet Kleaver Cruz knows this pain too well, especially in light of the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement.
Piercing through the heaviness, the New York native embarked on a 30-day personal challenge to share images of joy, beginning with a photo of his smiling mother, and passed the baton to his followers to do the same. “Something told me that I had to post this image, make a call about black joy,” Cruz told Mitú. “I posted that with a statement that said, ‘Let us bombard the Internet with joy.'”
The result: The Black Joy Project.
The activist firmly believes that joy in the face of oppression is, in fact, a form of resistance because it is rooted in embracing community, deprograming self-hatred, reclaiming humanity and owning one’s spirit.
“Black joy is very much a healing process…It’s a space of reprieve,” he later continued. “That if any black person, anywhere, wherever they are in the world, if they’re not feeling good that they know there’s a space where they can see people that look like them smiling in real ways. And that they get to be apart of that community if they want to.”
The Black Joy Project – more than just a selfie
Posted by We are mitú on Wednesday, February 1, 2017