For Black Girls And Women Joy Is A Democratic Act [Op-Ed] - Page 2
On May 16, more than 5,000 people gathered in Selma and Montgomery for the All Roads Lead to the South rally, marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to protest a wave of Republican redistricting designed to dilute Black voting power after the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais. The message from the stage was direct. The attacks on voting rights across the South are coordinated. And if Alabama can be used to test drive attacks on democracy, Alabama can also be the blueprint for resistance.
I want to add something to that argument, because the blueprint is incomplete without it. The communities being targeted cannot resist on empty. In the thirteen Southern states where I work, the Black girls and women who are first in line for voter suppression are also absorbing a compounding crisis: inadequate access to healthcare and economic stress. The common assumption is that joy is what these communities cannot afford right now; but it is precisely what democracy cannot afford to lose.
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This is a structural claim, not a sentimental one. Authoritarian movements do not win only through courts and maps. They win through exhaustion. They count on the people they target becoming too depleted, too frightened, and too isolated to organize, testify, run for office, or believe participation is worth the cost. Demoralization is not a side effect of these tactics. It is the tactic used to destroy confidence, our resistance, and our participation. We find ourselves too overwhelmed with fighting and too tired. But I’m here to tell you, this is the fuel for white supremacy and nationalism.
Unfortunately, the South is where that tactic is piloted first. The voting restrictions, the gerrymanders, the bans, the quiet removal of protections that once felt permanent. If you want to see what is coming for the rest of the country, watch what happens to the most vulnerable communities in the South, because we are usually first. That is also why the resilience built here matters far beyond here.
When organizations across the South invest in the well-being of Black girls and women, they are not handing out a luxury. They are protecting a community’s capacity to keep showing up. A young woman who feels seen, supported, and connected is a young woman who registers voters, who speaks at the school board meeting, who runs for the seat no one expected her to want. Well-being is not separate from civic life. It is the precondition for it. The 5,000 people on that bridge did not appear from nowhere. They came from communities that had been sustained long enough to still believe showing up was worth it.
This is why I push back when joy is treated as the opposite of seriousness. The people under the most pressure understand better than anyone that endurance is a political resource. You cannot sustain a movement with people running on empty. You cannot defend a democracy with a citizenry worn down to the point of surrender. Cultivating joy, dignity, and connection among the people most under attack is not a retreat from the work. It is the maintenance of the people who do the work.
The pro-democracy movement still has a habit of writing off the South as already lost. That instinct is both wrong and dangerous. It cedes the ground where authoritarian tactics are road-tested, and it abandons the communities with the most experience surviving them. Black Southerners have spent generations building the muscle of refusing to be demoralized. That muscle is a national asset. Ignoring it does not make the country safer. It makes the country slower to recognize what is already happening to it.
