Anna Redsand

For the past several years I've joined the Read Harder Challenge from Book Riot. The challenge lists 24 categories to read from over the year, and readers choose the books they'll read to fit the categories. Last year was the first year I completed the challenge, not because I didn't read that many books; I usually read about six times that many over the course of a year. The challenge is meant to stretch readers––get us reading outside our comfort zones, and I must confess that in other years I didn't want to get stretched that far. One category last year was to pick a category from a previous year, and I picked number 4 from 2022: Read a book in any genre by a POC that's about joy and not trauma. There couldn't have been a better pick than Ross Gay's book of essays, Inciting Joy.
 
My book club of two, which meets every Monday afternoon to discuss books mostly about social justice and racism, has one chapter left in our current book, We Want to Do More than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina Love, who teaches at Columbia University, where she's been instrumental in establishing abolitionist teaching in schools. Love says abolitionist teaching is 'built on the creativity, imagination, boldness, ingenuity, and rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists to demand and fight for an education system where all students are thriving, not simply surviving." She shares some wonderfully triumphal examples from the early abolitionists and from contemporary co-conspirators.
 
Some weeks the book has been a really hard read, as it calls on the White reader, to do the necessary work to build a foundation for conspiring to radically change the educational industrial complex, which is really about changing US society. This past Monday in our club meeting, Janet kept talking me down (or maybe it was up) from my despair over ever being able to get it right, over the violence (not only physical) against each other that humans engage in over and over again, seemingly without hope that we'll ever change. Tuesday, I was still in a major funk. Wednesday, with gentle self-coaxing, I began to come out of it.
 
One thing I love in this book is Love's repeated emphasis on the necessity for teachers to recognize and nurture joy in their students. She refers to it as "Black joy;" in other places she calls people of color "dark folx," and that led me to call this post, not "Black Joy," but "Dark Joy." Dark joy is joy that "originates in resistance, joy that is discovered in making a way out of no way, joy that is uncovered when you know how to love yourself and others, joy that comes from releasing pain, joy that is generated in music and art that puts words and/or images to your life's greatest challenges and pleasures, and joy in teaching from a place of resistance, agitation, purpose, justice, love, and mattering."
 
The urging that we must see and respond to dark resilience, dark joy, dark creativity, is what gives me hope, moves me to be part of the struggle for justice in ways that I can. It helps me think about times in my own work with dark youngsters when I called on their capacity for joy. It also reminds me of so many more times I could have and didn't and need to forgive myself for missing and carry on.
 
My choice of image on this page, exemplifies dark joy to me. My painter and poet friend Gloria, who is Diné, has fought for justice all her life, and she has done it with humor and creativity. If you don't recognize it, her End of the Trail is a parody of the 1894 sculpture of that name by James Earle Fraser, which has become almost kitsch in its popularity. Fraser intended it as a commentary on the travesty settler colonialism and the US government wreaked on Native people. But it has also been interpreted as a statement that Indigenous people were destined to die out. Jeffrey Gibson, a sculptor of Native heritage said in an interview, "I saw [End of the Trail] as an image of a shamed, defeated Indian. It always made me feel bad about myself, and I wondered if this was really how the rest of the world viewed us, as failures." As Ross Gay does in so much of his writing, Gloria has embodied "dark joy" in her satire, resisting projections of hopelessness with strength and humor, imagination, boldness and a rebellious spirit. She has given me and many others pause to both laugh and take her message seriously.
 
If you're not familiar with the original sculpture, you can find many images of it online.

The conversation took place in the home of a woman I was meeting for the first time and included two of her close friends. The occasion was a small, intimate reading from my memoir, To Drink from the Silver Cup: From Faith, Through Exile, and Beyond. As the subtitle suggests, this book is a story about a spiritual journey. What it doesn't say is that the exile and what happens afterwards took place because I was a queer woman. The home where we met was in the Michigan city of my birth, which is the center of the very evangelical, once mainly ethnically Dutch-American church I was raised in. This church, fifty years after my exile began, is still in deep, one could even say extreme, conflict over LGBTQ+ inclusion. All three women had close ties with that church. Our host was Black, the other two women were White, and all three presented as heterosexual. These facts are important because they provide context to the discussion that ensued.

 
One of the women asked the action question, "What can we do to make it safe for LGBTQ+ people to participate in our church?"
 
My initial reply was, "Until there is full inclusion, it isn't safe." Then I suggested an intermediate step––something simple, like wearing a rainbow ribbon to let queer people know that it was safe to come out to the wearer, safe to expect support from them. At the same time, they'd be letting other non-queer people know where they stood. Wearing the ribbon would become an invitation to others to join in support of inclusion.

The bottom line, though, as internationally renowned education and racial equity consultant Dr. Muna Abdi said, is, "Inclusion is not inclusion if you invite people into a space you are unwilling to change."
 
Our host said, "I have a rainbow button that says, 'Ally.' I think I might start wearing that at church."
 
Then someone raised the question, "Who gets to decide whether you are an ally or not?"
 
I understood the point of the question. What if the person who says they're an ally sabotages you in some way? What if they do or say something that's counterproductive to the cause? But it was also a question of political correctness.
 
I come down on the side of welcoming people who want to be allies. Soon after that reading, my friend Monica Friedman, who is Jewish, and I talked about the question. She answered it regarding racism, saying she'd thought about it a lot because, "I've frequently seen people who think of themselves as allies, or who want to be allies, get shouted down or shamed out of the work because they're jumping in from a place of good faith without having read the right books and adopted the right vocabulary and unlearned 100% of systemic racism. And potentially that means that people who could be good allies are excluded from the work and lost to the cause because they're sent packing, licking their wounds and resolving not to try to help people who treat them in ways they aren't ready to parse. Of course, people don't want 'allies' who make them uncomfortable or who don't understand who they're talking to or what they're talking about. But as you say, intention and meaning no harm should count for something, especially if the problematic ally is interested in being educated."
 
On the other hand, correcting mistakes and educating people who want to be allies can be exhausting, and I have compassion for that, but as Monica added, "I would rather have an imperfect friend in my corner than make enemies of a goodly percentage of the people who think they're on my side, just because they aren't getting it right."
 
I'm sometimes afraid to step up when I'm needed as an ally, afraid I might say or do it wrong when I witness discrimination. It's because I'm afraid of getting called out for doing it wrong. So I say or do nothing, when something is absolutely needed, and I know it. We who have privilege, whether because of the color of our skin, our gender, or our sexual identity, need to step up and leverage our privilege on behalf of someone who is being marginalized or oppressed. To become what Dr. Bettina Love, in her book, We Want to Do More than Survive, calls "co-conspirators."
 
There can be a cost for being an ally, a co-conspirator––being called out by the one we're trying to support when we hate to be imperfect; losing status or valued relationships. The woman who followed her intention and wore her ally button to church was asked to stop wearing it or lose her leadership position in which she had formed deep and meaningful relationships with fourth and fifth grade children. She chose to make a stand and ultimately left the church after going through several heart-wrenching processes. She had proclaimed herself an ally and paid a heavy price. She hadn't waited for me or any other queer person to sanction her choice; she made it herself.

There can also be rewards for taking a stand. Just knowing we didn't let something evil go by uninterupted. Knowing we've been a refuge in the wilderness. When a Native friend thanked me for being an ally, that was more than enough.

When have you acted as an ally?

When have you been afraid to be an ally because you might not get it right?

When have you been afraid to be an ally because of the cost?

When have you been an ally and experienced the reward?

Another time, I'll share some of what I've been learning from Dr. Love about being a co-conspirator, which is a step beyond being an ally.