Defiant Sun
The University of Illinois 2026 Black and Latinx Summit
On February 21, 2026, at the I-Hotel in Champaign, Illinois, college students (and ZENtheRapper) from around Illinois gathered on an apricitous late winter day to connect with and charge each other, ringing round the rosie of “cultivating joy.”
An evening somehow simultaneously reflective and buoyant, it mirrored the apricity of the day’s weather – apricity being the glow and heat of the sun in the winter.
Gardens were watered and roots were re-affirmed. We were granted philosophical and creative permission to identify and embrace joyful perspectives: a culturally defined and divinely apportioned joy… one which no man, which no time, which no hardship may steal.
The event was the 2026 iteration of The Black and Latinx Summit. It’s a cultural education type of gathering that happens yearly on The University of Illinois’s campus, put on by the student and faculty leadership of La Casa Cultural Latina and The Bruce Nesbitt African American Cultural Center.
This year, with help from some amazingly flamboyant dance teams and the unmatched grace and rooted grandiloquence of Jamila Woods, we explored this concept of joy from the perspective of peoples who have been oppressed, marginalized, and persecuted.
We, the people, for whom sad stories are all too familiar.
We, the people, who know fighting, who know unfair, who know disadvantaged.
We… We came together and we worked on this concept of radical joy. How can we smile in our pictures and express a divine delight, while eliding those historical connotations of Sambo… of happy slaves?
How do we make space for healing and prioritize praise among a people who are hurting, in front of people priming to police? How do we lift our heads and reflect the sun’s light, even on cold days – when most of the days, truthfully, are cold. How do we giddy ourselves up to a gallop and a trot and a canter, trading workhorse for unicorn and apocalypse for a promised land?
We don’t have to pretend, that’s the thing.
We don’t have to pretend the hurt is not there. It’s a certain alchemy, a certain strength provided, ironically, by our experiences persevering through deferred dreams, which we can tap into, a soil of soldierly experience which is ready to render roses and dragonfruit.
We have to practice allowing. Allowing others to misunderstand. Allowing others to be miserable among our merry company. Allowing the natural joy which we possess to shine through, unguarded. A new kind of warrior. Warriors for peace and providence, setting down those swords we have found along the way which secured our solace and protected our persons; safe, harbored, tucked away in those darker corners, away from the light.
There was a moment during this event, during the first workshop I attended, led by Yoleidy Rosario Hernandez; the workshop was called “Polaroid Poetics.” Hernandez was adamant in a “I-don’t-care-how-early-in-the-morning-it-is” kinda way about leading an active and engaged workshop.
She forced us into action, and we found each other’s gardens flowing with fruits, actually.
“Scroll through your camera roll, and find a moment where you captured joy.”
I’m a stinker in these kinds of activities. I’m constantly taking pictures to develop my artistic motifs. Lately: lots of long walkways and lines of lights. I had taken a picture of a bush outside the conference center that was covered in those stringy christmas lights. I wondered if these were a holiday holdover, or if they were year-round lights for the night.
Coming to this conference, I gave myself a written pre-prep talk that I sometimes require for emotional and social regulation ahead of new experiences. I would focus on listening. As a teacher, as a writer, as a rapper, as whatever I think I am, I am always trying to tell somebody something. I shine a bright light usually — always have. But I have found that it can sometimes be harmful to others when I shine my light indiscriminately. It can be too much. I don’t always care. But these were my people… I could use some energy trying to behave a little bit.
Not stepping on people’s toes with my giant feet, kinda thing. Part of a team… Member of a community… It’s not always about me.
“Take a break from tipping the pail,” I told myself ahead of the event. You can ask people who attended. I wasn’t exactly a shy gardener. Light will shine.
But I behaved enough, I’d say. Balance isn’t a baking recipe, there are no precise measurements to consult.
The point of this vignette, though, if I could stay focused, is to share some fruits from Pilar’s garden with you.
She showed me a candid picture of her family, wouldn’t you know it, IN THEIR BACKYARD GARDEN, at her recent birthday party.
It was her and her whole family, caught candid, caught smiling… beaming really.
Her family, she tells me, is made up of the kind of people who don’t smile, the kind of people who struggle and persist and conquer obstacles. The warrior type. Just like… just like most of our families.
It made me wonder, really, about this idea of shining bright for the people who came before us. Not only our ancestors, not only our countryfolk… but our parents, our siblings who didn’t quite cross that threshold into being a first-generation college student. Shining, in this way, comes as an expression of historical consciousness, that interconnected human brand of historical consciousness which Jamila Woods’s professor told her Africana Studies was all about. The kind I’d like to continue to share through my work.
The joy we share is a principled joy
A deeply layered joy
A shared, a borrowed, an inherited joy
Beaming in these new places
For new reasons
Telling old stories
In new ways
Which harken back
While reverberating forth
A joy rooted in memory
In family
In struggle
In defiance
Daring
To dance
In the light
Of a cold sun
All thanks to the gardeners involved in bringing this event to life.