This piece is the first in a finished series of ink drawings exploring the themes of Black joy, justice, and radical leisure. The entire series is based on my finding that it was a common practice to not just attend the lynching of a Black person at your leisure, but to then go find a local shop that sold postcards of local lynchings, buy them, and write a mundane letter on the back to send to your family. Suffering, cruelty, and inhumanity were, and still are, but afterthoughts when dealing with Black Americans. I wanted to evoke a similar cathartic feeling of leisure at the suffering of violent oppressors.

Much conversation is given to discussing the reasons for and modes of revolution by way of radical politics, but not enough discussion is devoted to what comes between “burn it all down” and “build a new system.” Is there time for rest? For celebration? What does that look like for Black Americans? What do we do with the bodies that stood in the way of our liberation? The purpose of this series is not to offer suggestions but to visualize possibilities from the Black imagination after liberation. The purpose of this series is to provide catharsis and relief and hope to the Black Diaspora.