Three Minutes of Joy: What Young Black Poets Teach Us About Surviving America
In the summer of 2015 I attended the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival in Atlanta and witnessed the legendary Philadelphia Youth Poetry Movement win the tournament with a closing poem about Black joy. It was mid-July. News of the death of Sandra Bland was barely a week old. We were still reeling from the state-sanctioned killings of Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, and Michael Brown. The grief of the Charleston church shooting still hung thick in the air.
And here was this all-Black team of youth poets challenging us to find joy in the midst of devouring sorrow. They ended their piece quoting the chorus from Alright by Kendrick Lamar: “We gon’ be alright.” Three minutes and thirty seconds of hope.
At that moment, those young poets reminded everyone in the room that joy itself could be a form of resistance.
Just over a decade later, I still think about that performance.
Because the conundrum of being Black and aware has not disappeared. If anything, the tension has grown sharper.
In 2020, millions of people flooded streets across the world following the murder of George Floyd. The protests that followed — often referred to as the George Floyd protests — became the largest civil rights demonstrations in American history.
At the same time, social media timelines became a strange mix of grief and celebration. Videos of protests sat next to clips of Black kids dancing. March footage next to backyard cookouts. Hashtags like #BlackJoy began trending regularly.
Joy was not frivolous — it was defiant.
Writers like Ross Gay had already been exploring this idea in books like The Book of Delights, a meditation on noticing small pleasures in a world structured by injustice. In film and television, creators like Issa Rae and Donald Glover built worlds where Black life contained humor, romance, awkwardness, and imagination — not just trauma.
Meanwhile artists like Beyoncé and Solange leaned further into visual and sonic celebrations of Black interiority, lineage, and healing. Even in the midst of chaos, Black people kept carving out moments of breath.
Still, awareness carries its own weight.
To be politically conscious while Black in America often means existing in a near constant state of vigilance. There is always another headline, another viral video, another reminder that the world can turn hostile toward your body with terrifying speed.
