Black joy – Jason Toney

Photo of whole crab in black bean sauce served in a rustic clay pot, garnished with sliced green onions, with chopsticks resting across the rim. Shallow depth of field, muted background. Photo by Vernon Raineil Cenzon.

April 25, 2026 / 0 Comments

Earthly Treats

Crab in black bean sauce, at least as it is served in American Chinese restaurants, starts with a whole crab, most likely Dungeness here in LA, still in the shell, chopped into sections, and stir‑fried until the shells are bright red. It’s then simmered in a fermented black bean sauce. The sticky, unctuous umami bomb was among my father’s very favorite meals.

We observed his birthday this past week as a family by ordering a take-out feast in which this signature dish took center stage. As we sat around my mother’s dining room table, sharing updates on the extended family, job interviews, what’s going on in our fair city, and anything else that came to mind, I imagined my dad there with us, listening and smiling as was common in these kinds of situations, content with letting the loudest voices in the room ramble on from topic-to-topic as love, friendship, and warmth filled the space.

While I’m sure we all had at least a bit of melancholy visit us on that day, it didn’t find me when we were together.

Dave McMurray, a Detroit-born saxophonist, composer, and bandleader whose decades-long career spans jazz, rock, R&B, funk, and pop and includes work as a sideman with artists like Albert King, The Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan, offers a thesis statement about dealing with grief right at the start of his late 2025 release, I LOVE LIFE even when I’m hurting.

“I know despair don’t care, but be strong!”

It’s a matter-of-fact recognition of truth rather than an exclamation, yet it still stings like an unexpected slap back from the brink. McMurray’s album has been my soundtrack for finding a grounded sense of hope and optimism when those feelings of sadness and loss compound.

Throughout the work, he uses his mastery of the genre to show where and how he finds the will to keep going: in a smile, a joke, or a kind word (even if not explicitly for him), in music that can ignite something within. Beyond “This Life” and the title track, I’m drawn to “We Got By,” a cover of the tune from Al Jarreau’s debut album, with neo-soul vocalist Kem joining McMurray, honoring a lineage of Black resilience. The track is immediately followed by a cover of Yusef Lateef’s “The Plum Blossom” that knocks my socks off. McMurray picks up the flute here, and the performance never fails at lifting my spirits.

I first became aware of McMurray as a sideman on Kem’s debut album Kemistry, the 2003 release by the also Detroit-born singer and songwriter whose warm, romantic songwriting helped define a quieter, emotionally grounded lane of early-2000s R&B. Kemistry returned to regular rotation around this time last year because it was a connection between a friend who died unexpectedly and me.

The opposite of staying stuck in that loop of sadness and despair is to turn to our creative sensibilities. A loss of his own inspired McMurray to say, “I love life even when I’m hurting.” He told Downbeat Magazine’s Bill Murkowski that, a month later, he’d write the track of the same name as a way to give form to what he had been feeling.

The opening track, This Life, was written last. While its original intention was to reckon with physical trauma, that same pain he’d seen in a friend that inspired the title song, he now sees its connection to the precariousness of this cultural and political moment, both at home and abroad.

It is difficult these days to escape the doomscrolling. With a flick of my thumb, real-world turmoil—uncertainty, anxiety, and violence that feels both distant and imminent—plays on an endless loop.

On one of the social media apps, a painter I don’t know asked, “Does art really matter right now?”

A friend replied to her with a quote from the American writer, filmmaker, and activist Toni Cade Bambara:

“The role of art is to make revolution irresistible.”

As McMurray’s work reminds us, living is not optional. Loving is not frivolous. Optimism is not a luxury reserved for easier times. Creating transforms that which ails us into something that might heal those wounds.

And sometimes you’re mended by wishing a silent happy birthday to your father while sharing one of his favorite earthly treats with the people he loved most.

Alt text: White sculptural figure of a tall Black man with locs extending his arms forward, gripping a small equestrian statue by the tail and holding it aloft; the miniature monument dangles upside down, emphasizing a reversal of power within a museum gallery.

January 4, 2026 / 0 Comments

MONUMENTS

A year before we married in the city, we spent a Memorial Day weekend in New Orleans. We stayed at Hotel LeCirque. It stands on what is now Harmony Circle, once called Place du Tivoli. In 2010, it was still known by the name it had carried for more than 130 years: Lee Circle. As in Robert E. Lee, the defeated Confederate general.

Our room faced the circle, where the enormous statue of Lee, mounted on his horse, was perched, looking down upon us and all those who came to enjoy what is, otherwise, a wonderful part of my second-favorite city in the country. Every morning when I opened the curtains of our room and was greeted by the long-standing monument to a man who led armies that killed tens of thousands for the express purpose of keeping people who look like me enslaved, I cursed his name and flipped him off.

That twelve-foot bronze monstrosity celebrating “the Lost Cause of white supremacy” no longer stands atop that perch. It was removed in 2017 during the great reckoning around Confederate memorials that followed the 2015 Charleston church massacre. That moment of overdue accountability, in turn, provoked a surge of white supremacist counter-rallies opposing the removal of these monuments, culminating in the “Unite the Right” rally in August of that same year — an event that ended, predictably, in violence.

It should come as no surprise, then, that despite the threat of rain, we recently trekked to Little Tokyo for First Fridays at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA to view MONUMENTS. The exhibition examines a decade of contestation over Confederate monuments in public spaces across the United States, pairing decommissioned statues with works by nineteen artists reflecting on the monuments themselves — and on what both their presence and their removal might mean. Robin D. G. Kelley has called it the most important exhibition currently on display in any museum in the nation, perhaps even the world.

Given the authoritarian tendencies of our current administration and the increasing comfort with which some Americans express supremacist ideology, I suspect he may be right.

While there are many monuments on display—several destroyed, dismembered, or defiled—the data reveals a more unsettling truth: four out of five Confederate statues in this country still stand. Though I delighted in being able to once again whisper “punk bitch” to statues of Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and their ilk, the reality is that these losers are still honored as heroes in government-owned spaces—the people’s places—across this nation, and not merely in the South.

Inside The Geffen Contemporary, the people are represented by a wall of photographs taken by the nineteenth-century pop-up photographer Hugh Mangum. Despite working during the Jim Crow era, Mangum did not segregate his subjects. Everyday Black and white men and women gaze out from fragile glass plates, serving as witnesses to the era when many of these false idols were elevated in their name, supposedly for their benefit. The counterweight between these perspectives—common folk rendered vulnerable by time and decay, and monumental figures cast in bronze and stone—is striking. As in my memory of New Orleans, the gaze still moves upward, toward icons of oppression looming above the public.

Hamza Walker and Bennett Simpson, the curators of MONUMENTS, consistently juxtapose competing ideas. Nowhere is this more devastating than in the placement of white grievance in direct proximity to Black grief. It was impossible not to break down while watching Julie Dash’s short film HOMEGOING, in which Davóne Tines sings the souls of those murdered in the Charleston church shooting home. It was even harder to suppress the rage stirred by the glossy images of Ku Klux Klan members displayed in the very next room.

I was too overwhelmed by my visceral reaction to The Birth of a Nation to appreciate Stan Douglas’s reinterpretation fully. Still, encountering Descendant by Karon Davis—my favorite piece in the show—proved cathartic. The statue depicts a young Black boy, Davis’s son, with locs standing tall, holding a miniature monument of a Confederate General on horseback by its tail, as if it were vermin. The juxtaposition filled me with joy. When faced with the grave threat posed by the darkest hearts of our fellow Americans, Black folks have long mastered one enduring response: trolling.

After this whirlwind of emotion, Tiffany and I exited the museum ready to join the dance party promised as part of First Fridays. There was none to be found. BlackMuseumist was spinning, but the makeshift dance floor remained empty. Blame it on the rain. Or perhaps people don’t dance in public the way they once did, surveilled as we are from every angle.

We, however, would not be denied. After two-stepping to some rare grooves, we threw up a peace sign to the DJ. He answered with Fela Kuti’s “Water No Get Enemy.” Those afrobeat horns and drums got us sweating, shaking loose whatever heaviness had glommed onto us through the gallery.

MONUMENTS makes plain the weight of what this country refuses to reckon with. Our most violent truths occupy the public square. The hatred is sanctioned. The cruelty is celebrated.

Still, we dance.

four people holding hands and dancing in a circle with big smiles on their faces

November 2, 2025 / 2 Comments

Shake what your mama gave ya

As we tumbled out of BB King’s on Beale Street after a night of celebration, a family friend said, “This may be the drinks talking, but I never saw you dance with your mother.”

I had danced with her—there’s photographic proof—but she wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t danced much that night.

There was a time when I was always the first on the dance floor. My mother tried to awaken that version of me when Bell Biv DeVoe’s “Poison” came on.

But the dancing machine would not be roused.

I could offer excuses: my age, my weight, the era of constant surveillance and online judgment. But the truth is more straightforward, and harder.

I’ve struggled to find unabashed joy these past few years. And dancing, sweaty, silly, all-in dancing, has always been my most authentic expression of that relentless, unyielding, undeniable pleasure.

One of my mantras this year is get over yourself.

Another: don’t let these motherfuckers steal your sunshine.

When I don’t dance, especially with the people I love most, I’m not honoring the goals and values I’ve set for myself.

Worse, I’m not being true to who I am.

And worst of all, I’m letting the onslaught of negativity win.

No, ma’am.

I recently caught a clip from The Grits & Eggs Podcast about the power of Black joy: how it remains both antidote and anathema to the race-based authoritarianism rising around us.

It felt like a challenge.

So with two months left in the year, let’s shake what our mamas gave us.