Kitchens, Laughter, and Survival: Black Technologies of Resistance
January often arrives with new year, new me energy. We set resolutions—many of them already fraying by the second week. We make plans. We dream big. We promise ourselves reinvention.
But January also asks something quieter and deeper of us: to remember. Not only who we come from, but how we have survived.
I was recently recording a podcast episode for Black Modern Mystic with Dr. Tamice Spencer-Helms when they asked me, “What does the phrase resurrection technology mean to you?” The question lingered. Resurrection implies that something has died. And yet, despite the best efforts of empire and whiteness, Black people have never been dead.
Yes, our bodies have been beaten and broken. Yes, unarmed Black people have been shot and killed. Yes, there are endless attempts to kill our spirits, our joy, our imagination. And still—we remain. We have endured because we learned how to make a way out of no way, using what we had at hand. We survived through our technologies of resistance.
Black people have always had technologies of resistance—not machines or apps, but ways of living, knowing, and caring that made endurance possible under conditions designed to crush us. These technologies were forged in kitchens and sanctuaries, on porches and picket lines, in laughter that cut through despair and stories that carried truth when silence felt safer.
Black women have been among the most faithful engineers of these technologies.
Long before “innovation” became a buzzword, Black women were building systems of care that refused erasure. When institutions failed to protect us, we protected one another. When power demanded our exhaustion, we learned to rest in community. When the world insisted on despair, we practiced joy anyway. These were not accidents. They were strategies.
Communal care has always been one of our most enduring technologies of resistance. Care was never just kindness; it was infrastructure. It looked like women pooling money to bury the dead with dignity. Like aunties watching each other’s children so someone could attend a meeting, catch a shift, or lie down for an hour. Like prayer circles and healing circles that required no credentials, only presence. Care functioned as a counter-system, refusing the lie that survival is an individual project.
Food, too, has always been a technology. Not just nourishment, but memory and medicine. Black women turned meals into rituals of survival: feeding families when cupboards were bare, feeding movements when spirits ran low. The potluck was political. The repast was theological. To gather around food was to insist that our bodies mattered, even when the world treated them as disposable.
Storytelling has been another sacred tool. When official histories erased us, Black women told stories anyway. Stories carried warnings, laughter, grief, and instruction. Folklore, testimony, gossip, sermons, and songs became vessels of wisdom. To tell a story was to claim authority over meaning—to say, we know who we are, even if the record refuses to say it right.
And then there is humor.
Black laughter has always been more than entertainment. It is pressure release. It is critique. It is survival. Humor allows us to name the absurdity of oppression without being consumed by it. It lets us breathe. It reminds us that we are still human, still creative, still capable of delight—even in the face of violence and loss. A joke, a side-eye, a laugh shared at the right moment can say: They haven’t taken everything.
These technologies: care, food, story, and laughter were never neutral. They were acts of resistance precisely because they affirmed life where death was expected. They protected the soul when the body was under constant threat. They made room for joy without denying pain.
Remembering these tools matters now.
In a moment when so many are searching for new strategies, new models, new solutions, remembrance reminds us that we are not empty-handed. We inherit a lineage of resistance that is relational, embodied, and deeply creative. The question is not whether we have tools—it is whether we will honor them.
To remember Black technologies of resistance is to remember that innovation does not always look like disruption. Sometimes it looks like preservation. Sometimes it looks like laughter. Sometimes it looks like feeding each other and telling the truth until morning comes.
Want to continue this conversation? Join Faith Matters Network’s next Womanism Around the Table: Black Rituals of Love and Resistance on Thursday, February 12. Register here.
