Black Balloons

On oppression, joy, and the aerodynamics of survival.

My grandparents migrated from the Caribbean to the United States in the 1920s. Redlining restricted where they could live. Laws justified systemic discrimination. The extraction of skilled labor and ideas far outpaced remuneration.

And the threat of state sanctioned violence loomed omnipresent.

Mom’s dad, a trained chef, toiled in railcar kitchens. Dad’s dad, a classical pianist, took work as a piano tuner. Their days were filled with the knowledge that using the wrong water fountain or bathroom could mean never coming home. Their nights?

At night they donned their best flapper apparel and went stomping at the Savoy.

It’s not coincidence the Harlem Renaissance and segregation were contemporaries. If you’re Black in the United States, there is no “rise of fascism.” Whether your Ancestors were brought here against their will or emigrated, the moment your feet touched ground, you inhabited a land that was actively hostile.

Germany didn’t invent the Nuremberg Laws; they studied Jim Crow and took notes.

Centuries of enslavement. Black Codes. COINTELPRO. Voter suppression. I am on record as saying if you want to save democracy, study Black history. Too often this turns our suffering into entertainment, missing the point entirely. Turn off the trauma porn. We did not become unbreakable on grit alone. We learned to treat joy as infrastructure, not reward.

Joy floats.

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From plantations to chain gangs, Black folks have always understood: oppression is gravity with intent. The heaviness you feel isn’t imaginary, it’s structural. The never-ending spew of hatred in the news cycle is designed to create feelings of hopelessness. Being informed becomes being incapacitated.

Empire counts on your surrender. Despondent people don’t fight back.

Broken spirits accept their fate and consign themselves to the inhumanly inhospitable. The industrial despair engine never stops churning. It requires your complacency. Dissociation abdicates the possibility of change. Resilience–the ability to respond to force by refusing to surrender your softness–allowed Black communities to deform, reform, and keep going.

Except, resilience without joy is earthbound. If resilience is rubber, joy is helium.

Helium rises because it’s lighter than air. Joy happens when the density of our interior world—our collective imagination, faith, humor, creativity—becomes less than the external atmosphere of oppression. If you’re Langston Hughes, you write “Luck.” If you’re Billie Holiday you sing “Summertime.” You don’t treat joy as an option.

Joy is a line item. Joy is part of the budget.

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Helium without containment dissipates into the atmosphere. Joy without resilience escapes containment. When elasticity and buoyant energy coexist in dynamic equilibrium, the weight of the world becomes relative. Each generation of Blackness remixes this equation anew to meet the times. Reconstruction gave us the blues. Civil rights gave us rock & roll and rhythm and blues.

Mass incarceration gave birth to hip hop. Today TikTok is rediscovering them all.

Softness that remembers its shape can hold the impossible. Lightness that stays contained can change the air itself. That’s the aerodynamics of Black life: we don’t fly away from hostile atmospheres.

We fly inside them.

Every game of the dozens in every barber shop. Every electric slide at every cookout. Every time we meet the pressure of the world with refusal, we defy gravity. We convert pain into propulsion. When Black communities were flooded with crack during the 1980s, we learned to spin on our heads and called it breakdancing. We weren’t trying to create an olympic sport.

We made our bodies move like rubber and called it moonwalking.

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If you’re waking up to a country which has removed the veneer of protections, Black people left a field manual for survival. It’s what happens when we take rubber and fill it with helium. Find your resilience. Fill it with joy. Yes, get mad, just stop performing outrage.

Empire is forever earthbound by the weight of its hate.

The world’s density can be soul-crushing. You are not obligated to match it. Your job is not to get heavier. It’s to stay just light enough—for yourself and your people—to keep rising.

Joy is not mood. Joy is architecture.

Black people have been running anti-gravity experiments nonstop for four centuries. When they stole our liberty. When they took our freedoms. When they tried to remove our dignity. The one thing they could never seize was our joy.

Joy isn’t a treat for good behavior. Joy is load-bearing.

You call it culture. For us it’s not decorative; it’s buoyancy infrastructure. Lift happens when what’s inside is lighter than what’s outside. Joy is how we made our interior less dense than the atmosphere of hate around us. Practice joy as necessary maintenance, as good design.

Sing your songs. Stomp your feet. Allow reality to vulcanize your clarity.

Don’t just mitigate harm. Refuse to surrender your softness. Fill your resilience with light from within. Let them combine and form the engine of your becoming. The lighter the spirit, the higher the flight. When the force of lift equals the weight of the world minus the weight of the self?

That’s how you get helium in hell.