Affirming Black Joy & homeplace: A call to action for practitioner preparation programs

ABSTRACT

Despite growing discussions of antiracist practices and policies in PK-20 schools, education tends to critique racist structures without providing solutions that bring into the conversation the lived experiences of Black students, families, and communities. While these critiques may be helpful, we suggest these critiques omit practices and policies that attend to how education could become a homeplace that affirms Black Joy. In order to realize the affirmative possibilities of homeplace, we argue that more attention is needed toward practitioner preparation programs as training sites for building out education as a location for Black Joy. We discuss the current context of preservice teacher and counselor education training and provide tenets of Black Joy and homeplace that can serve as guideposts for more complete critical accounts of antiracism.

Acknowledgments

We recognize and acknowledge the labor upon which our country, state, and institution are built. We remember that our country was built on the labor of enslaved people who were kidnapped and brought to the United States from the African continent and recognize the continued contribution of their survivors. We also acknowledge all immigrant and indigenous labor, including voluntary, involuntary, trafficked, forced, and undocumented peoples who contributed to the building of the country and continue to serve within our labor force. We recognize that our country is continuously defined, supported, and built upon by oppressed communities and peoples. We acknowledge labor inequities and the shared responsibility for combatting oppressive systems in our daily work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional resources

Given that Black Joy in education is still being dreamt, the following resources invite readers to explore outside connections to bring back to education.

1. Sojoyner D. M. (2022). Joy and pain: A story of Black life and liberation in five albums. University of California Press.

This book offers a multifaceted understanding of Blackness which is impacted by the carceral state while also possessing a collective joyful resistance. This book is creatively presented in 5 albums which detail freedom dreams through the story of a young man named Marley.

2. Cooper, C. (2023). Better living through birding: Notes from a Black man in the natural world. Random House.

This memoir details the life of Christian Cooper, a Black, gay birder whose confrontation with a white woman, Amy Cooper (no relation), walking her dog in Central Park went viral in 2020. Christian not only recounts this violent incident but also the joys of being Black, gay, a birder, and a Marvel Comic Book nerd. In doing so, Christian shares his process of learning to be and how he has defended this space of being for himself and others.

3. Solomon, R. (2019) The deep. Simon & Schuster.

This Afrofuturistic novel was developed from a song bearing the same name by Clipping, an experimental hip-hop band. Solomon engages in the radical imagination of a underwater society of descendants of pregnant enslaved African women who were thrown overboard during the trans-Atlantic slave trade.