What Us White People Are Getting Terribly Wrong About Juneteenth

Friends,

I recognize I have a multi-racial audience who read these essays. Today, I am feeling the need to say “we” white people and “us” – not because I think everyone who is reading is white. It feels important to me to position myself as part of a people, not outside of it.

I do not want to stand on the outside and throw stones. I want to shore up, shoulder to shoulder, with people who are my people – whether I’ve chosen them or not – because, to put it bluntly – I am on the white people team.

I have light eyes, light hair, and light skin, and I am never mistaken for any race other than white. I wear the cloak of whiteness in every single interaction I have – keeping me differently protected than all of my friends and neighbors who are BIPOC.

Alright. So, the commemoration and now national recognition of Juneteenth was last week. Unfortunately, there were both material and spiritual fuck ups.

A quick Juneteenth primer via Wikipedia for folks who want to brush up:

 On September 22, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln announced that the Emancipation Proclamation would go into effect on January 1, 1863.

 June 19, 1865, was 900 days after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, 71 days after Robert E. Lee surrendered to the Union on April 9, 1865, and 24 days after the disbanding of the Confederate military department covering Texas on May 26, 1865.

 While that date did not actually mark the unequivocal end of slavery, even in Texas, June 19 came to be a day of shared commemoration across the United States – created, preserved, and spread by ordinary African Americans – of slavery’s wartime demise.

Although many Black and African American communities have celebrated this watershed moment for decades, June 19, 2024, marks only the third year of federal recognition and commemoration of Juneteenth.

 The day was recognized as a federal holiday in 2021, when the 117th US Congress enacted and President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law.

To put a finer point on it, Juneteenth re-surfaced for people and politicians as worthy of national discussion following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by police. The co-occurring conditions of that particular murder being video-taped and distributed around the world, people being home and glued to their TVs and social media during the early days of COVID-19 lockdown, and a cultural whiplash feeling going from the Obama presidency to Trump, to Biden…well, America seemed to be grappling to find our footing.

Ya’ll know how I feel about the surface-level bullshit associated with holidays. Federally recognized holidays are not now, nor have they ever been, universally celebrated on this part of this continent by all peoples.

- White people seem not to know what to do about “Columbus Day” now that Indigenous People’s Day is recognized in much of America.

- White people seem not to know what to do about the Fourth of July – especially if you have nostalgic memories of BBQs and fireworks.

- And white people seem not to know what to do about American Thanksgiving even after realizing that what we are celebrating is an aberration, a snippet, a farce of a complex story marked in fact by the U.S. breaking treaty after treaty with Indigenous protectors of this land, attempted genocide, and engaging in ongoing and modern-day colonization.

Uff da.

I know. It’s a lot.

And…

It’s the truth!

You’ve heard me say over and over again – and I’ll keep saying it until we can believe it – WE ARE ADULTS. We are capable of doing hard things. We can tell the truth. We can reckon with the impact of unconscionable behavior. And we can do our damndest to make some meaningful amends in our lifetime.

Back to last week - the third-ever Juneteenth to be federally recognized in America.

I woke up that morning and upon realizing it was Juneteenth genuinely felt a little sick to my stomach. You see, I played fastpitch softball as a youngster. A thing that would happen all the time up at bat was ‘a swing and a miss!’

Depending on your coach, you’d get praised for at least trying. Swinging, whether or not the pitch was good, felt at least like taking action rather than just watching the ball fly by.

Here’s the thing with that. I think for us white Americans, Juneteenth 2024 was, at best, a swing and a miss. There’s a “see, we did it!” quality to acknowledging slivers of our national history that feels placating, surface level, and too little too late.

Before you see me as entirely fatalistic, I’ve got another metaphor that keeps coming to mind when I think about how we could ever right this ship.

Have you heard – “I think we’ve missed the forest through the trees?”

This visual resonates with me a lot. Do we understand the point, the key, the essence? Or are we looking somewhere else entirely and getting distracted and off course?

- 4 th of July – Would we like a moment to recognize the incredible innovation in the U.S. Declaration of Independence? Bill of Rights? And Constitution? And would we like to celebrate what we have accomplished and become as a country that we’re proud of? Sure.

o Do we need the holiday itself to be centered around blind nationalism and supremacy, belittling our brothers and sisters around the globe? I don’t think we do. Is it more important that we obsess over our flag or our people? That shouldn’t be a hard question.

- ‘Columbus Day’/Indigenous People’s Day – The Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria story was certainly part of my public-school education back in the 1980s. It wasn’t until college that I came to understand the intentional colonization and purposeful treachery and theft that was outlined in ship manifests, logs, and journals of so-called “explorers.” Subjugation, conquering, and colonization was the goal. No ifs ands or buts about it.

o Other nations, with varying degrees of success (ex., the UK, Canada, Australia, South Africa), over just the past few decades, have started to name and reckon with the imperialist, racist, and violent pasts of their white people. I remain curious: how is the U.S. going to decide to tell the truth about the past 400+ years of white people flooding into this part of North America and all that we did and are doing to displace and eliminate people who are not interested in Western European assimilation?

- Thanksgiving – Well, fuck. Does a national day of gratitude and family and food sound lovely?

Totally. The Food Network, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and capitalist induced “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” sales have all become American staples. That said, how do we move away from a dark and lie-filled story about Pilgrims and Indians being friends? This is going to be a helluva a rebrand and some white Americans are so fragile they will scream from the rooftops that we are trying to take all national pride away if we ever dare to move the day or title or purpose or history. It’s like they will spontaneously combust if they can’t watch football and eat nachos.

Truly, I am not trying to belittle tradition. I know there is much power and spiritual value in shared rituals. But for right now, I am going to continue to be very irritated that we are rallying around memories of war, commerce, and colonization. We could choose to organize our celebrations around children, food, community, or really anything that holds value and meaning in our lives as we understand them.

As a white person alive in America on the third Juneteenth ever recognized, here is what I noticed, and here is what I wish we could work to do better moving forward.

I noticed white people trying to white-wash Juneteenth.

- I was in a session with a group of clients last week and one of the women of color mentioned her deep disappointment that our local bridge was lit up with red, white and blue lights to “honor” Juneteenth rather than red, green, and black of the Pan-African flag. It is as though white Americans cannot figure out how to hold the dualistic reality that Black Americans descendent from enslaved ancestors live here now yet also feel deeply connected to a lineage that comes from somewhere other than here.

- My sense of the day was that white people, as onlookers to Black Americans expressing pride, felt pretty chuffed that there was a day seemingly making so many Black people happy. Most of us whites missed the opportunity for deepened self-reflection around the fact that Juneteenth calls attention to the fact that a bunch of white people behaved like total monsters.

Those white folks in Texas (and that does NOT let us northern whites off the hook) LIED and pushed back and resisted for NINE-HUNDRED-DAYS. White people refused to abide by the law, finding ways day in and day out to justify their “ownership” of other human beings, convincing themselves that their economic security and fortune and their belief that God liked them more justified treating Black people as less than human.

I get it – white Americans living today did not enslave Black Americans. And yet, every single day we benefit from cultural, institutional, and systemic-level support that fixates on white wealth and health.

What I deeply believe we can and must do better, especially as white Americans, moving forward.

- Cultural self-awareness is critical to intercultural capacity building. We live in a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious America. We can either keep behaving like precious little deer in headlights – shocked and confused about what is going on – or we can choose to get our shit together and reckon with the specificity of our own learned anti-Blackness.

- Certainly, there are white people all over the U.S. working hard to create and make programming accessible for white people to engage in meaningful reconciliation work. Rather than jump on the bandwagon of celebration on MLK Day and Juneteenth, what would it look like, if even for one hour on those designated commemoration days you make a commitment to map out tangible ways for you as a white person to make actionable anti-racist moves in your life, work, and neighborhood?

- Rather than being reactive and defensive and throwing your hands up in the air to say, “I didn’t do it!” or “My relatives weren’t even here, yet – we didn’t do it!” to take a deep breath and reckon with the reality that we are alive and living at a time when U.S. systems still preference white people. That is not an accident. It is a project. And one we continue to benefit from in modern-day America. Racism and colonization are not in the past. They are alive and well right now. So rather than treat any of these commemoration days as flat history lessons, consider how with your money, your time, and your talents you will choose to live your values – even if for now they are counter-cultural and may make you look like a weirdo.

I recognize this essay has a particular tone. I listened to “gentle” music while I was writing it because I’d been thinking about it for days, and my heart was beating fast, and I was feeling furious.

I am disappointed – in myself and in us. Why? Because we can do better. We are not morons. We are innovators. I feel like grabbing white Americans by the shoulders and shaking them out of this feeling of a sleep-walking-like-stupor. If we could wake the hell up and choose to reckon with the damage our fellow white people have caused, we could start taking ownership to dig in on some of the generations-long repair work needed.

It’s a lot. But we can do a lot. Let’s not shy away from a fight. It starts inside, that’s the only way we can hope to show up differently with and for the BIPOC people in our lives we care deeply about. It’s an inside job.

Moving forward, instead of just appreciating the day off, ask yourself, what do I want to use Juneteenth to remind me to do in my ongoing work to extricate anti-Black sentiment from my thinking and behavior?

With love,