Donald Trump and 17 others have been charged, arrested, and booked in Fulton County Georgia for trying to conspire with local election and government officials to change the outcome of the 2020 election.
Specifically, Trump and his group of criminals tried undoing votes cast by Black voters in Georgia where the governor, Brian Kemp, had already made voting extremely difficult for Black people.
And that is the thing, isn’t it? The nonstop effort to make things harder for Black folk.
Getting a job is harder, as are getting a home, or renting an apartment.
It is harder to get into university, get a promotion, get medical care, and to have a baby and survive having a baby.
It is harder to walk or jog outside, to shop, play at a playground, drive in cities and through sundown towns. It is harder bar-b-que at the park, swim in public pools, shop at the mall, and to birdwatch in public spaces.
In America it is harder to be Black than it is to be any other race of people. And that is by design and it is fed and nurtured with every generation of white Americans and folk from other races who attach themselves to whiteness.
It is even harder to laugh and have fun.
The mugshots of Trump and the seventeen other anti-American criminals who tried to overturn Georgia votes and thus the federal election were immediately mocked, memed, with created gifs as only the internet can do.
The laughs are flowing just as they were a few weeks ago when the Alabama brawl happened following a group of Black folk coming to the rescue of a lone dock worker who was brutally attacked by a group of white boaters who refused to move their boat from a space where they did not belong.
Black people make fun and laugh at everything and everybody, regardless of the social norms established and adhered to by white Americans.
We find humor and sparks of joy regardless of our wealth, where we live, who we love, or what we are going through.
Black joy is unique, ubiquitous, and unstoppable.
It is therefore saddening and maddening that of all the awfulness and hate directed at Black people, one of the worst is the desire to mute our joy.
White America have long used our humor and joy for their own entertainment while also demanding that we not use it for our own edification — and as long as their use of it *also harmed us they were happy about it.
As with everything race related in this country, attacking our laughter and humor has its roots in the time of slavery when white people owned our bodies and our emotions.
We could not laugh or even smile in public — unless we got permission and even then that permission was specious. We couldn’t cry or cry out when beaten or whipped. And we couldn’t mourn the death of our loved ones or the stealing of our children. We couldn’t miss our family when we had to attend to the enslaver and their families. And we couldn’t joke at the absurdity of the white lives we oversaw less some child decided we should die and their parents acted on their wishes.
White people weaponized and monetized our humor and joy for themselves in minstrel shows, blackface, and caricatures of our features and how we walk, run, sing, and express fear, and even how we love.
It is hard to imagine the depths of hatred of Black folk but understanding the desire to mute our joy is a place to start.
We are attacked for being angry — especially Black women.
But who doesn’t want someone to laugh or express joy?
Black folk were happy with a Black mermaid and that caused white people to review bomb the movie before and after it was released, while other white people wrote editorials and produced long videos about how it wasn’t “Historical to have a Black MERMAID.”
Black folk were attacked for dressing up to see the first two Black Panther movies and lectured that “Wakanda isn’t REAL.”
This action plays out every time there is a “Black first” — Astronaut, principle dancer, senator, mayor, CEO, university president, coach, franchise owner, sports team owner, NASCAR racer, and, yes, President and Vice President.
We are chastised about being too happy, and celebrating too loudly and with too much energy. We are cautioned, warned, and even find ourselves kicked out of our children’s graduation ceremonies when we cheer — and our kids are even denied their degrees when they cheer their own accomplishment.
High school graduate speaks out after being denied diploma on stage after dancing during ceremony
A recent graduate from The Philadelphia High School for Girls is calling for change after she didn’t receive her high…
Can you imagine any people in the world so insecure in their own selves that they actively work to stop a minority group from having and expressing any type of joy or happiness?
When our athletes celebrate they are penalized in almost every sport — rules were created to stifle and penalize our celebrations in baseball, football, tennis, basketball, and any other sport we find ourselves in. The owners of the leagues and the networks that pay them — owned by white men — dedicate time, resources, and money to stop Black folk from having fun.
When we’re dancing alone or in groups, when we’re laughing joyfully in public, when our kids are celebrating in school.. here comes the negative nabobs of negativism to try to shut us down.
How miserable it must be to express misery at other folk’s joy.
Now imagine you are Black and you have all that negative attention and energy directed at you, your family and friends, and your kids.
All the time. Every day. And for any reason that the average person would find joyful — if the joy was being expressed by almost anyone else who isn’t Black.
It is saddening, maddening, debilitating, and exhausting for us, our children, our elders, and all of the Black diaspora who live in and who visit this nation.
It is critical to note that Indigenous, Latino, Hispanic, and other non-white brown people experience similar vitriol for expressing and sharing joy and jubilation. Jerry Seinfeld dedicated an episode on his former show making fun of the fact how much he hates New York’s Puerto Rican Day parade- the largest parade in the city and one that has celebrated the nation’s 5 million Puerto Ricans for decades.
And cable news attacked Mexican-Americans who cheered the Mexico national team when they played the US Men’s team at the L.A. Coliseum in 2011.
The lack of empathy from white people specifically toward Black people is an entire industry by itself and one that never runs out of fuel.
We can be serious, thoughtful, studious, and quiet and be hated but nothing quite alarms white people as our joy.
They will boo our most accomplished athletes and loudly root against us. We saw it with Venus and Serena Williams for years at many US Tennis tournaments during their careers, most notably at Indian Wells, Ca, when the all-white audience viciously boo’d and hurled racist epithets at the young stars with so much vile energy the sisters did not return to the venue for 14 years.
Serena Williams still haunted by booing, jeers at Indian …
https://www.espn.com › tennis › story › serena-willia…
It was then President Obama’s correspondents jokes about Donald Trump that many say spurred Donald to run for president. He was so mad at being made fun of at an event designed to make fun of the rich and famous that he decided to ruin America and install himself as dictator.
Such is the power of our jokes.
Our smiles are so powerful that we are in awe and happy when Dr. Martin Luther King’s family releases a photo of him laughing and smiling.
There are literally hundreds of articles and millions of social media posts and comments dedicated to Vice President Kamala Harris… laughing. She has never shot anyone in the face but judging by the hatred from white people just for her laugh one would think she had done that and much worse.
When we aren’t seen or accepted with humanity and empathy it becomes that much easier to further our dehumanization by denying us the most basic and important human emotion — laughter.
Making American life harder for us at work, school, in public, in politics, in our neighborhoods, and in our online communities is awful, degrading, and humiliating. And by trying to stifle the healing emotion of laughter and laughing, of jokes and giggles, and of the joy and life, family and community affirmation that comes with those necessary human emotions, racists and white supremacists are doing something much more evil and insidious.
They are attempting to make us empty humans devoid of culture, history, and joy.
Black people will not be quiet or tamp down our humor or laughter for the comfort of anyone. Ever.
And America would be much better off it it adopted the ability that the Black community has to be introspective and find the humor in difficult times and tough situations.
And judging by the environment the country now finds itself in — an insurrection, a felonius former president on trial in multiple states, the rise of fascism, and an aging white population that will need Black and other non-white citizens to maintain the country and its place on the world stage, white America would be so much better off to emulate Black folk’s ability to laugh.
Because we cannot go forward into a better and happier future unless and until white people learn to laugh and express joy the way Black people do.
They can start by not trying to stop us from laughing because it has never and will never work.
Dear Dean 
