7 Black Joymakers You Need to Know

Adreinne Waheed, a photographer who splits her time between Brooklyn, New York, and Berkeley, California, literally visualizes Black joy.

“I create images of Black joy as a resistance to Black trauma and pain,” she says, adding that she loves to photograph Black people.

Waheed says it’s important for Black people to be able to express themselves “fully and freely,” highlighting that that’s when Black joy shines brightest.

This is on full display in Waheed’s book Black Joy & Resistance, an almost 200-page journey documenting Black Americans’ experience of joy as resistance and the creation of joyful spaces, including at the Afropunk festival in Brooklyn, New York.

“I make images of joyful Black beauty and brilliance,” says Waheed, who envisions the future of Black joy as “health, safety, and freedom for every little Black boy and girl.”

After her own mental health struggles left Lauren Carson in search of (and not finding) racially sensitive and gender-responsive resources to help, she vowed that other Black women and girls would not have the same difficulty getting access to culturally appropriate care. In 2012, she founded Black Girls Smile, a nonprofit organization that provides young Black girls and Black women with mental health education, resources, and support intended to uplift and empower them.

“I work at all times to help others focus on their mental health and well-being and tap into their internal and external resources to live mentally healthy lives,” says Carson, who is based in Atlanta. She knows from experience that staying on top of mental wellness can require daily effort.

“Honestly, [after] attempting to take my life for the second time and being hospitalized, I knew I needed to make some big changes,” says Carson, adding that to take care of her mental well-being, she had to focus every second, minute, hour, and day on being her best mentally.

“I know as a Black person — and particularly as a Black woman — it isn't easy to focus on yourself and prioritize your personal mental health,” she says. “But I see and witness the power that comes when Black women and Black people are at their best mentally: We change the world!”

Carson is trying to do just that: change the world by bringing visibility to therapy, self-care, and coping skills. It’s the future of Black joy she sees.

“I would love to see therapy continue to be normalized and more accessible,” she says. “I would love to see generational trauma discussed, and opportunities to heal — particularly from intergenerational conversations,” she says, adding that she would love to see more education and awareness around positive and healthy coping skills for working through trauma, stress, and anxiety.

If you or a loved one is actively in crisis and in need of immediate support, call 911. You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or text 741-741 to reach a trained counselor with Crisis Text Line.

Kleaver Cruz, a writer and educator in New York City, created The Black Joy Project in late 2015 after dealing with a great deal of sadness over losses in both their personal life and within the Black community. A Black queer Dominican American who acknowledges that Black people have always experienced joy and happiness despite hundreds of years of oppression, Cruz decided to mobilize others on a journey to experience joy and begin the healing process.

By sharing imagery of Black people smiling and in joyous moments on Instagram and by organizing events in real life, The Black Joy Project has helped reshape the narrative about Black people's holistic experiences and emotions: It's not only about trauma and pain.

“In our own language, and when relating [to] and working through conflict, it feels genuine when people are saying, ‘You know what, I’m going to choose joy in this moment,’” they say. “Remembering to choose joy … has been a game changer. The people closest to me are using that as a tool, too.”

Cruz says that The Black Joy Project has always been about putting people from the Black community at the forefront who are often heard the least, as well as about making connections. “[It’s] for us to be in certain places — not just visible, but having the power and the collective power to do what we need to do and make changes,” they say.

To that end, they’re also working on a book about experiencing Black joy, and how joy is a form of resistance, that will serve as another tool for the movement.

“I’m really excited to put something out that's going to exist in the world to start that conversation or continue it, support it, affirm it, whatever you want it to be,” Cruz says. “Hopefully, it [will] reach minds and hands and people … and we can build on top of it, and I'm excited for that.”

Kwame Mbalia is primarily a middle-grade author, meaning he writes for children ages 8 to 12.

Following the success of the first two books in his award-winning Tristan Song series, Mbalia released Black Boy Joy: 17 Stories Celebrating Black Boyhood in August 2021, an anthology for children with contributions from 17 critically acclaimed Black authors.

The writer Danielle Young was the first to coin the phrase “Black Boy Joy” in her article “Thanks to Chance the Rapper, #BlackBoyJoy Is a Thing” after watching his performance on the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards, and Mbalia’s use of the phrase worked, too: The children's book instantly became a New York Times No. 1 bestseller.

“Since I write for younger readers, it’s important to me to reflect the totality of emotions, specifically regarding the Black experience, and that means highlighting our struggles — but also emphasizing our joy,” Mbalia says.

The author, who is based in North Carolina’s research triangle area, hopes people will read his books and get experiences of joy.

“Being able to construct worlds centered around Black culture while welcoming all cultures is central to my process, and I’m glad so many people have come along for the ride,” he says.

Mbalia says his parents inspired him to write joyous stories about Black people: His mother is a writer and his father is a captivating speaker.

“Their determination to not only find books about Black characters written by Black authors, but to also shop at Black bookstores and buy from independent Black writers, gave me inspiration to do what I do today,” he says.

Mbalia says one of the great things about being an author is that stories linger, and fans become friends with the characters.

“Writing books that wield Black joy like a shield becomes a destination Black children and everyone else can journey to and know that they are cherished, loved, and supported,” he says. “Anytime I see a book compared to Tristan Strong or Last Gate, I know something I’ve created is lingering.”

Dalila Ali Rajah, an actress and writer based in Los Angeles, founded the online Black Queer Joy movement to highlight content and experiences for queer Black people in 2019. “I wanted to curate a space that’s purely about our joy,” she says.

“I think for Black people in general, but especially Black queer people who are at the intersections of multiple traditionally underrepresented groups, seeing consistent demonstrations of our joy is incredibly important,” she says. “Being joyful and living happy lives is in and of itself a revolution.”

Though cultural oppression and systemic racism have, as Rajah puts it, tried to block Black joy for hundreds of years, perpetuating an idea that joy for Black people “cannot be long-lasting … over and over and over again, we as a people find joy,” she says.

“For some reason, we’re constantly sent images that we can’t keep [joy], that it can’t be sustainable, that we can’t have happy endings,” she says, adding that the Black Queer Joy movement aims to shift this narrative.

“Black joy is our transformative superpower as a people,” she says. “No matter how often these systems work to break us, our ability to be creative and find our inner light is what has allowed us to continue.”

Rajah leans into her joy every day. For her, joy is in her storytelling as well as her connections and relationships. She refers to herself as a storyteller and artivist, using art as a form of activism.

“My mission is to tell authentic, delightful, thought-provoking stories that expand deeper knowing and connection,” says Rajah, who wrote, produced, and stars in the short comedy Secrets & Toys. “My desire to tell stories is deeply rooted in creating ways to open hearts and minds while sparking the fire of introspection.”

In fact it was the director Wanuri Kahiu’s Kenya-based queer love story Rafiki, which Rajah watched with her transgender son at the Outfest Fusion QTBIPOC Film Festival in March 2019, that sparked the flames that started Black Queer Joy: She launched it the very next month.

“There came a point [in the film] where the same-gender-loving couple was in a very heightened state of joy, and I had this sinking feeling in my body of like, ‘Oh no. Something horrible is going to happen,’” she says.

“[My son and I] are two generations of out, queer Black people, and when we saw a beautiful, affirming love story and a couple’s joy, we both thought, ‘Something horrific is coming,’” she says. “If that is what happens when we watch a film, how often does that happen when we have joy moments in our own life?”

After experiencing a roller coaster of emotions during the film, Rajah says she burst into tears in the lobby of the theater. That’s when she decided to start Black Queer Joy.

Since then, she has been regularly flooded by input from followers on Instagram, where the movement keeps gaining momentum. “So many people comment or write to me about how much either seeing the page or being featured made their day,” she says.

As the founder and CEO of the Black Joy Parade in Oakland, California, Elisha Greenwell says, “I’m a builder. I build things that bring me joy, first and foremost, and then bring other people joy.”

First held in 2018, the Black Joy Parade garnered a Community Juneteenth Impact Award from the African American Community Services Agency in 2020 for being “committed to elevating and creating Black joy for our community,” she says.

“I choose to see that optimistic, positive side of my life,” she says. “You attract who you are. I think that that attracts other people who are that way, and also helps other people who maybe aren't that way find more joy in their own lives.”

“Black Joy Parade is just one example of the way that I've made joy,” Greenwell says before clarifying she didn't really "make" joy.

“I made a space for people to have joy,” she says. “I made a space where they can feel safe. They could be with the people that they feel like they can be themselves around, [people who] celebrate the things that they love.”

The Black Joy Parade is held annually on the last Sunday of February.

August Clayton is the founder and executive director of Mosaic, an organization that prioritizes the self-determined safety, survival, and wellness of Black trans men and masculine folks in the mid-Atlantic and DC-Maryland-Virginia area. He describes himself as “a Black trans man from the rural mid-Atlantic, reader and re-reader of bell hooks, resource mobilizer of many organizations, student of abolition, and lover of unserious moments.”

In an article he wrote for the National Center for Transgender Equality, titled “Black Trans Joy,” he says, “Joy is speaking life and possibilities into the transformative experience that is being young, Black, and trans. Joy is seeing my Black trans kin, especially Black trans men and masculine folks, experience abundance.”

For Clayton, who is based in Prince George's County, Maryland, Black joy means to not only find joy for himself, but to socialize it.

“Experiencing [joy] helps me stay present, humorous, and playful in a world that is committed to siphoning moments of joy from Black people via state-sanctioned violence,” Clayton says.

He envisions his kinfolk experiencing joy, which means for them “to have housing, healthcare, access to pleasure, experiences, and a life where survival is not what we dream of.

“Materialized, joymaking feels like me offering my time, my being, and my skill to [be a] resource and pour into folks who I consider kin,” Clayton says. “For me, that looks like Black trans men and masculine folks.”

Clayton ties his impact as a joymaker into how he uses his platform to organize for Black transgender and queer people and to mobilize others.

“I didn’t have to be inspired to become a joymaker — I just witnessed a gap in the investment that folks have in the skill and the resources of Black trans men.”

And through his work, which has included alternative building, communications, and grant writing, Clayton says he has "socialized resources beyond my own imagination. I hope that I’ve inspired others, especially those that consider me a joymaker, to continue pushing for and organizing to create conditions for our survival.”

In looking at his future hopes, he says, “The future of Black joy looks like organizations not being tethered to the state or beholden to anti-Black philanthropy to be able to get our needs met. Black joy looks like building relationships, socializing our resources, and a constant turning toward one another. The future of Black joy looks like the end of this world as we know it.”