Bringing Joy Into the New Year: Reflections on 2024 and Hopes for My Community in 2025
As 2024 ends, I am reconsidering how I will enter this next phase of uncertainty in America. The citizenry of this country has decided that they won’t be governed by the fully qualified Black woman who had plans for improving the American experience for everyone. Instead, they chose autocracy and the rule of a nation by the wealthy and a band of merry criminals who hate the people they hate: “the Blacks,” migrants, Jews, women, trans and LGBTQ folks, children, the poor, and anyone else who is not a wealthy cis-gender white male dabbling in Christian nationalism. It is pathetic, really, but also all too American.
While I reminisce over the year we’ve just endured (and stomach the absurdity of Time magazine’s Person of the Year choice), I revisited footage from the first night of the Democratic National Convention last August. The roll call, with its energy and optimism, centered joy — a quality the media hailed as “refreshing” about Kamala Harris’s campaign. For a brief moment, Americans felt that joy… until they didn’t.
Harris lost to a man who is not only an adjudicated rapist but also convicted of 34 felonies related to election interference, found guilty of fraud in New York, indicted for inciting a violent insurrection in 2021, racketeering in Georgia, and hoarding classified documents in his bathroom.
What came next? The blame game. Black women saw it coming. That train of coded misogynoir from white liberals (especially the males) is never late. They turned the narrative on Harris, dissecting what she did wrong, instead of examining the system that was always stacked against her. And let’s be real: it’s easier for them to sit with their peers and vent than to call out a racist Meemaw, PawPaw, or Aunt Peg on their bullshit. They didn’t want to face the MAGA loyalists in their family at Thanksgiving or Christmas, so they stayed comfortable in silence. That silence? It was complicity. It was cowardice. And it was predictable.
The campaign infrastructure wasn’t without fault either. Built for Biden, it was inflexible when it came to Harris. Voters wanted to know her — the Black woman of Indian ancestry who broke barriers. Being white doesn’t shape one’s existence in this country the way it does for non-white people. All of the systems and institutions are designed for their success. When someone who is not in that skin can achieve similar things despite all of the intentional roadblocks in the way, it is something worth discussing, championing, and celebrating. People wanted to hear this story; it was this kind of story that helped Barack Obama come to prominence. But those advising her decided she could win by skimming over her identity in an election that was hyper-powered by identity politics, where identity defined the existence of both candidates, but only overshadowed the campaign of one.
Black people knew better. The fact that those advising Harris wanted to pretend all things were equal in the face of an America that had embraced the rhetoric of the past in the present in hopes of stalling a demographic shift in the future was the real problem.
Black women called this out from the start, and now, after this colossal loss, we’ve decided we’re done doing this dance with America. This country has shown us time and again how little it values our survival, and ultimately its own.
So with all of this in mind, I am thoughtful about the next phase in our collective history as Black people, specifically our survival as Black women, and what our “joy” looks like.
No doubt there will be frustrations over the next four years. But joy is a deliberate choice. It may be the only choice if, as Black people, we are going to continue surviving in a country that takes every opportunity to reject and ignore us. Joy doesn’t mean smiling when we face discrimination. It doesn’t mean playing to the stereotypes of Blackness that make white people comfortable. Sometimes “joy” can mean being unbothered and unburdened by foolishness.
I advised my friends and family that one way of choosing joy is deciding to not let others control your emotions, especially your anger. Whoever can control your anger becomes your master. This doesn’t mean killing them with kindness because they see kindness as compliance, it means showing indifference. That is how the power dynamic shifts. Not being able to rattle you will make them so angry, that you have control over their emotions as they continue to find ways to shake you. That anger increases the more they see you don’t care. Whiteness requires being centered in everything. The worst thing to people who are compelled to be centered is to let them know you don’t care about them, their whiteness, or their issues. When they hear or see you don’t care, it is the best antidote to their unearned sense of self-importance. This is especially true for the Klan Karenhood. They will be especially exhausting over the next four years.
In their darkest moments, our ancestors chose this type of joy because they understood the long game and the promise of the future. The promise of a better future motivates us to endure the difficulties of now. Joy is a mechanism of Black survival — the armor beneath which we’ve endured suffering and strife. Joy is what brings us closer to that state of spiritual nirvana where we can sing songs like, “I Will Survive,” and know that we will.
I applaud Black women, in particular, for choosing joy in this moment. This is probably the most selfish thing we have ever done as a sisterhood and we deserve it. Self-preservation is the only way we will survive what is to come and joy is the only way to avoid the nonsense and the noise that seeks to pollute our lives.
From my viewpoint, I see the absence of joy and a return to anger among white liberals and others who are succumbing to the fear and doom this incoming administration wants them to feel. The “resistance” isn’t resisting; it’s surrendering. It’s dark over there in that place they want to dwell, but not here in the space Black women are choosing in 2025.
Let’s not be naive — there are dark days ahead. Tariffs, another pandemic, foreign wars, and the erosion of human liberties. The worst is coming, but that’s why we must show up as the best of who we are. For the Black community, that means fortifying our culture, protecting it, and evolving it. It means utilizing our own resources — bartering within our communities, educating our children with truth and accuracy about the history of this country, and leveraging our political power locally, in school boards, PTAs, city councils, and other spaces.
America will never be our utopia. It was never designed to be. So, we must carve out our own perfect spaces. These can be our neighborhoods, our homes, or anywhere we create joy and safety. These spaces are for us so they do not need to be advertised only to fall victim to the viral moment. Viral Black culture becomes diluted and easily commodified by folks who are not Black and they do not put the money back into the community they stole from. The best of us has always operated quietly and below the fray of spotlights and celebrity. We must move inconspicuously if we are going to have these places and moments of joy. Monetization of our culture shall be of our choice and making. We need to be the beneficiaries of our brilliance as a people.
We warned the masses about Project 2025. Now, it’s time to prepare for how it will look for us. Let them figure out their plan over there. Ours is to find unvarnished joy, protect our peace, and survive the next phase of American history with our families, communities, and sanity intact.
We’ve survived season one of this dystopian clown show. Season two promises to be worse. But in 2025, Black people are creating a different kind of space — a space where we can simply be; a space where our joy is unshakable, our creativity boundless, and our existence unapologetically and freely of our own design.
May you enjoy your holidays and time with those you love and who feed you spiritually. For those who will be alone this year or facing difficulties, reach out — let’s build community and fellowship with one another. You survived this year, and you will survive another. I wish you joy in the coming months and hope that you grant yourself the permission to say, “Get someone else to do it,” to the people who voted to exploit our community and its unique gifts.
Until January…
