We hammer away at the world by noticing it. A hammer is a rather blunt instrument. Noticing can also be a pen or a key board, writing as fine tuning, how we rearrange the world, moving words around so things appear differently. There is wisdom here. I use the word strangerwise for this wisdom. It is an odd word for an old wisdom, the wisdom of strangers, those who in being estranged from worlds, notice them. Sometimes, we need to take it on even when we can’t take it in: to take it on as to take it out, to get out, to protest, to express ourselves. It was when I wrote Living a Feminist Life that I felt the fullness of my debt to you. That book had your handprints all over it, signs of what I could do because of what you had laboured to show, what you had left out for us to see. I remember putting your name on the top of the list of scholars who I would love to endorse that book never imagining you might say yes. When I first saw your words about my work I almost fell out of my chair. I was profoundly moved to know that you had read my work let alone that you had endorsed it. We see the violence of how people turn away from the violence, turn away from those who suffer the consequences. We will not turn away. Solidarity also means being willing to keep opening that door, to the hardest most painful truths, the violent colonial histories that are kept present, violence that is still. Let me explain what I mean by returning to common sense conservatism. We could compare the book written by the Common-Sense Conservative Group, to the Sewell Report published in 2021, the UK government’s most report on race. The report declared that there was no evidence of institutional racism in the UK. It claims some ethnic groups do not well because they are too negative, they dwell on racism or are haunted by history. It even suggests we see the positives in slavery. Yes, it was a polished report.

Such solidarity would not be safe in abstraction, warm and fuzzy, a way of feeling something without doing it. It would be a call to action and to attention, keeping at the front of our consciousness the reasons we need to be in solidarity, the violence, the material realities of suffering, ongoing colonial occupation, the brutality of state racism. A wagon, a red wheelbarrow. The question isn’t which one was it. Objects acquire different colours and shapes, depending. And writing too; how objects acquire different colours and shapes, depending. You might be a red wheel barrow or a wagon. The question isn’t which one. Sometimes, in loosening our hold on things, also ourselves, we bring them to life. In a conversation with Gloria Steinem, bell hooks describes how she is surrounded by her own precious objects, feminist objects. They are the first things she sees when she wakes up. She says “the objects in my life call out to me.” And then she says she has “Audre Lorde’s ‘Litany for Survival’ facing me when I get out of bed; I have so many beautiful images of women face me as I go about my day”.Power can be exercised by the bypassing of policies and procedures designed to intervene in the reproduction of power. This is also how institutional change can be prevented by appearing to be enabled. An organisation can be called too woke because of its diversity initiatives, and still be successful at reproducing whiteness and other forms of power and privilege. A complaint can be the effort to make the institution admit it, let it in. But then: you come up against the institution. So often: you end up out. Appealing to common sense is thus often about appealing to those who assumed to have it and for whom some things should be just plain obvious (if this is a claim about reality, this “should” should show us that claims about reality are also often moral claims). But even if common sense is presented as a faculty of a subject, the literatures of common sense are full of objects. It might be obvious why this is the case. Those who defend common sense do so by exemplification; examples include human-made artefacts such as tables but also human bodies and their parts (2). The analytical philosopher G.E. Moore argued that he could not be more persuaded by sceptical questions about the existence of external reality than he could by common sense. And in defending common sense, he makes use of his own hand both in his paper “In Defence of Common Sense,” and then in a lecture, “Proof of An External World.” It is in the lecture that Moore’s hand acquires an exemplary status. He asks: how can you prove the existence of an external world? He answers his question by holding up his hand: “How? By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, ‘Here is one hand’, and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, ‘and here is another.’” The gesture is not just pointing to something (what should be obvious to someone with common sense), it is a refutation of something, or somebody, else. The hand provides evidence of the folly of scepticism. The hand, in other words, becomes a tool. Towards the end of our chat, I wondered whether being a killjoy requires a certain level of privilege. Quitting your job because you disagree with the workplace’s principles, or standing up to your family — these actions are risky, and resources help mitigate that risk. But Ahmed disagreed. “Some of the people who are least likely to kill joy are people who are the most privileged because they have a lot of investment in the institution as it is and they benefit from that,” Ahmed explained. On the whole, she said, people kill joy to survive. I consider the “the table” as an object of common sense in the wider project, drawing on Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition as well as The Life of the Mind.

The words feminist killjoy came to me because she was already out there, a recognizable figure, a stereotype of feminists, those miserable feminists who make misery their mission. Misery is not our mission. But still if misery is what we cause in saying what we say, doing what we do, we are willing to cause it. Note also the new habit of scholars who have best-selling “anti-woke” books representing their popularity as a sign that the public are tired of wokeism. It is rather amusing. But it is also sad and pathetic. Of course, their books are bestselling because of the alignment of their arguments with the views of the powerful: governments that are willing to stoke the anti-woke to increase their popularity; not to mention the global rise of fascism. We have heard how the hand of common-sense conservatism is extended as certainty from what is mine to social relationships and institutions. This extension is not simply an act of individual cognition, but an institutional mechanism. To have a place at the table, you are required to affirm something, its reality, value, its status as possession (3). I will be describing this requirement to affirm as “polishing the table.” To polish can mean to make something smooth and shiny by friction or coating, to see to one’s appearance, or to refine and improve. The word polish shares a root with the word polite. In UK, polishing is a national past-time. The history of the British empire is often told as a polite story of well-mannered colonisers. Those of us living and working in the UK whose families came from former British colonies are asked, nay required, to gloss over the violence of histories that led us to be here. And so, when our very arrival is understood as damage to legacy, we are tasked with repairing that damage.Consider the use of terms such as “race equality industry” to dismiss a whole history of efforts to bring about race equality or the use of the term “trans lobby” by many gender-critical feminists and their anti-woke allies. Any programmes designed to enable trans people to live their lives on their terms, to have access to public resources including health and welfare become treatable as a consequence of a “trans lobby.” This is how trans people who are under-represented in positions of power in media and government can be represented as powerful. We launched the book at an event in Rich Mix, London, on Thursday, March 2 nd 2023. It was electrifying and emotional to be with so many people – killjoys, colleagues, affect aliens, trouble makers, friends. Each of us can be all of the above! And we filled the room with our killjoy solidarity. And, it gave me a chance to think more about what I mean by killjoy solidarity. Killjoy solidarity is how I sign my letters, in Killjoy Solidarity, Sara, kiss, kiss. But it means much more than a way of signing or signing off. For me, killjoy solidarity is the solidarity we express in the face of what we come up against. In the handbook I offer what I call killjoy truths, or hard worn wisdoms, what we know because of what keeps coming up. Let me share the last truth offered in the book, which probably best explains what I mean by killjoy solidarity.

I am writing this post to express my gratitude to Ama Ata Aidoo. Ama Ata Aidoo died on May 31, 2023.

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A killjoy truth is also what is hard to know, what we might resist knowing because of what we sense we would have to give up. There are so many ways we can “not see” violence even when it is being directed at us, let alone when it is directed toward others. We can inherit ways of not seeing violence – dismissing words or actions as small or trivial, explaining violence away: it didn’t mean anything, he didn’t. A primary implication of the argument for c ommon sense conservatism is that traditions or conventions are or would be unchanging without the imposition of change. One way culture and history are treated possessively is to suggest change comes from outsiders. This is why the refusal to recognise the dynamic nature of culture is central to common sense conservatism. In my book, What’s the Use? On The Uses of UseI name institutions themselves as anti-life: to stabilise the requirements for what you need to survive and thrive within institutions is to stop changes that would otherwise happen because of the dynamic nature of life. We might call these techniques for stabilising the requirements reproductive mechanisms. When diversity work is understood as imposed change, this is in part a reflection of the investment of some people in institutions not changing (and when I say investment I mean it: those who benefit from institutions do not want changes that might risk their benefits, that transmission of legacy). Perhaps that’s why our stories matter so much. We become the evidence. Our bodies, our memories, our stories, colonial archives. And so, they try and contain us, to stop us from expressing ourselves. Our killjoy truths: in expressing them, we shatter the containers. Note that negativity often derives from a judgement: as if we are only doing something or saying something or being something to cause unhappiness or to make things more difficult for others. Killing joy becomes a world making project when we refuse to be redirected from an action by that judgement. We make a commitment: if saying what we say, doing what we do, being who we are, causes unhappiness, that is what we are willing to cause.