Joy Is a Strategy: The White Leftist Struggle with Spirit

Notes from a celebrationist

That’s why I’ve started to soft launch my identity as a celebrationist.

I’ve been toying around with an idea—thinking about what it means to approach movement work not just from a place of resistance or critique, but from a place of reverence, ritual, and joy. What it means to orient toward life. Toward safety, healing, and spirit. Toward thriving, not just surviving.

I’ve found that a lot of white leftists don’t know how to do that. They don't know how to move from spirit. And more than that—they’re suspicious of those of us who do.

There’s a particular type—well-read, well-intentioned, and very committed to their principles—who still can’t seem to get free. Not in the liberatory sense. Not in the way that breathes life into movements. These are the folks who treat politics like a grad seminar: footnotes, frameworks, and feelings trimmed down to “rational discourse.”

They approach liberation like a math problem, and that approach bleeds into how they interpret movement making and history—stripped of spirit, ritual, and the metaphysical undercurrents that actually made those movements possible.

Take the Haitian Revolution.

Too often, it's discussed in purely materialist terms: the first successful slave revolt, or the first labor strike of the modern world. And yes—it was that. Enslaved Africans organized themselves, fought back against the brutal conditions of plantation life, and overthrew one of the world’s most powerful empires. But what white leftists often leave out is that the Haitian Revolution began with ritual.

The Bois Caïman Ceremony—held in 1791 under the leadership of the priestess Cécile Fatiman and the houngan Dutty Boukman—was not just a “meeting.” It was a spiritual invocation. A vodou ceremony calling upon the ancestors, aligning the will of the people with the will of the spirits. That ritual didn’t just launch a rebellion—it sanctified it. It declared that liberation was not only political, but cosmological. It wasn’t just a battle for freedom—it was a battle for the soul.

According to lore, the Bois Caïman ceremony took place on the night of August 14, 1791, deep in the forest of northern Saint-Domingue. Enslaved Africans gathered in secret, under the cover of night and the canopy of trees, to invoke their ancestors and the lwa—the spirits of Haitian vodou. The ceremony was led by Dutty Boukman, a houngan (priest), and Cécile Fatiman, a mambo (priestess), who is said to have been possessed by the spirit Erzulie Dantor during the ritual.

A black pig was sacrificed as an offering, and the participants are said to have sworn an oath of unity, drinking the blood of the pig in a ritual bond of solidarity and courage. They called down divine wrath on their oppressors and summoned ancestral protection and power for the rebellion to come. Boukman is believed to have delivered a fiery sermon, declaring that the god of the enslaved people demanded justice and liberty—not submission.

Within days of the ceremony, coordinated uprisings erupted across plantations in the north. Bois Caïman didn’t just light the match—it blessed the fire. It framed the revolution not just as a tactical response to oppression, but as a sacred, cosmological reckoning.

But when overly academic leftists try to narrate the Haitian Revolution, many skip over vodou entirely, or worse—reduce it to superstition. They want to celebrate the strategy, not the spirit. They want to analyze it like a case study, not honor it as sacred resistance.

And it’s not just Haiti.

The Civil Rights Movement is often remembered as a secular political movement with a charismatic preacher at its helm. But Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t just “a good speaker”—he was a theologian. His commitment to nonviolence was rooted in Christian doctrine, and the movement itself was sustained by Black church networks, by gospel songs, by theologies of deliverance and resurrection.

To acknowledge this would require white leftists to admit that spiritual practice isn’t inherently regressive, irrational, or apolitical. That belief and ritual can be radical technologies of freedom. But many refuse to go there—because spirituality, to them, signals a lack of seriousness. As if spirit isn’t the deepest kind of seriousness there is.

And honestly? That’s where the distrust comes in. That’s where even the most well-meaning white leftists start to feel adjacent to accelerationists—because there’s no clear path in their ideology toward life. Toward joy. Toward the actual practice of creating safety and abundance.

Something I think about a lot is how liberation has always been spiritual, always been embodied. There’s an ancestral component to this. Getting ourselves free has always involved spirit, and always involved the body.

I don’t mean spirit in a floaty, abstract, white-washed way.
I mean ass-shaking.
I mean hair-braiding.
I mean altar-tending.
I mean sweat and oil and grief and praise.
I mean cracking jokes on the front porch while you snap peas and plot the revolution.
I mean singing your people through the hard parts.
I mean protecting what is sacred, and knowing how to name what is sacred in the first place.

And if you can’t recognize those as forms of organizing, as forms of resistance, then you’re missing the whole point.

This is why I call myself a celebrationist—because I believe joy is not peripheral to justice. Joy is justice. Pleasure is not a side effect of the work; it is the work. So many of our people didn’t survive just to survive. They survived so we could feel good. So we could gather, and heal, and holler, and praise, and rest, and keep going.

And this isn’t just about Haiti or the U.S. South. Across the world, revolutionary movements have been steeped in spirit:

In Brazil, enslaved Africans carried their orixás and ancestral practices into the foundations of Candomblé, a religion that preserved culture and resistance in the face of colonial erasure. Candomblé terreiros became spaces of refuge, organizing, and remembrance—spiritual centers that held both political power and ancestral truth.

In the Ghost Dance movement of the late 19th century, Native peoples gathered in ecstatic prayer, dance, and visioning—not to escape the world, but to restore it. It was a spiritual uprising against genocide, against white expansion, against the theft of land and culture. The state responded with massacre. That alone tells you how powerful prayer can be.

In Palestine, the traditional folk dance Dabke continues to be a way people gather, resist, and remember themselves. It’s danced in the street, in refugee camps, on rooftops. It says: we are still here. Our joy is intact. Our rhythm cannot be erased.

These aren’t side notes to “real” political action. These are the political action.

Ritual is not a detour from material struggle. It is the technology we use to stay human in the face of systems that want to grind us down. It is how we metabolize grief and build courage. It is how we return to one another, again and again, across borders, across generations, across lifetimes.

To me, celebration is not a frivolous add-on to movement work—it is the work. Celebration is how we remember we are alive. That we are worth the effort. That freedom is worth the effort.

That’s what being a celebrationist means to me, right now. It means treating joy as political. It means weaving ritual into the everyday. It means seeing our movements not just as machines of change but as places of gathering, of rhythm, of praise.

Because if our movements don’t hold space for kinship—for being in community, for healing, for dancing, for feeling the drumbeat of something deeper—then what exactly are we building?

We don’t just want revolution. We want reclamation of life. We want relationship.

We want liberation that knows our names, that sees our spirits, that feeds us in body and in soul.

We want kinship.

And we are worthy of it.

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I’ve just begun a long-awaited writing sabbatical in Sicily to focus on my book In Kinship, and I’ll be sharing more reflections, creative pieces, and dispatches from this tender chapter here. This season is about keeping the fire lit — not just for the book, but for my health, my wholeness, and the many stories still inside me.

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