Juneteenth
By Diana Carson-Walker
I’m beginning to treat race descriptors like pronouns, swallowing the discomfort, and trying to make it a conversational norm.
How do you describe yourself? - A great question to ask people. And terrifying.
How do I describe myself?
So glad you asked, so we can get around this elephant in the room:
I’m a neuro-divergent, working-class, cisgendered, assigned-female-at-birth, white-skinned individual, who is on the gen-x end of the baby boom, born and raised in Washington State, pronouns she/they.
I have a co-worker that is brown-skinned, African-American, pronoun he.
He has some great perspectives, having lived as a brown-skinned individual in many places in the US. He is helping this white fish understand the water of systemic racism that I swim in.
He asked me the other day if I could explain Juneteenth. And to my chagrin, tons of information crowded my brain (it loves being filled with facts, rearranging them to suit whatever world I’m living in, and making shit up) and I spit out something like, “I’ve learned it, but don’t understand it.”
Because let’s face it, I didn’t live it, haven’t lived it, won’t live it in this lifetime, in this skin.
Us Washingtonians tend to think of ourselves as progressive, (or progressive-oppressed, depending on your political orientation). We were part of the north, after all, during the civil war. We were on the ‘right’ side of history.
So our work is done and dusted. *We’re* not racist. (insert ironic voice here)
I’m the first to admit I’m lazy. I have accepted the history taught in school and moved on through life: my brain can only handle so much - after all, I have to pick up my grande latte.
But layer by layer, I’m peeling it back, and learning.
This is the latest bulb to light in my brain:
Slavery didn’t end with the Gettysburg address.
Something that frustrates my co-worker is being asked to represent his entire race and explain himself to curious white people.
There’s a lot of us in Washington. We’re still pretty pale here. Aside from the classic Pacific Northwest weather, that is.
Yet, there is this universal human thing. We learn by stories.
I can google Juneteenth:
“Juneteenth (officially Juneteenth National Independence Day) is a federal holiday in the United States commemorating the emancipation of African American slaves.”
- Wikipedia
I’ve actually done it multiple times.
But it took another human, someone I work with, sweat with, wonder about pepperoni pizzas without pepperoni with (it’s a thing), to make it real for me.
The generosity of his question, (and his subsequent answer) now has me digging in - trying my best to put myself in his shoes.
His answer? “It’s like our Fourth of July, our independence day.”
I see my ancestors: white Irish farm refugees escaping the famine, railroad workers, rum-runners in the Dakotas. Sixteen-twenty hour work days, poverty and alcohol addiction haunts our past.
I see them sending guidance and messages: be careful, don’t overstep, but work hard and you can do anything.
Now, I imagine these great-grandparents, aunties, uncles, cousins, with the weight of slavery right behind them. And I feel a sickening shift.
My ancestors got to set a weight down coming here, to “the land of opportunity”.
My co-worker’s ancestors were dragged to this “land of opportunity”.
They didn’t set a weight down, they were crushed under it.
Then my happy Washingtonian white girl kicks in. “But WE didn’t do that. *I* didn’t do that, we’re a northern state, African-Americans have always been free here.”
Not.
Another gap in my understanding of history. Turns out that black slaves were brought across on the wagon trains, and our neighboring state had anti-black laws in it’s constitution. Much of the pioneer-spirited land claims were built by slave labor.
The past may be the past, but we CAN’T repeat it, or prolong it. To truly make it the past, we have to learn from it.
So I'm learning. In the now.
I’m learning it’s not about me. Not about my white guilt, nor anything I can do to “undo” things. It’s about respect, and a smidgen of empathy of what that must have been like, and how it might carry forward to today’s generations.
It takes self-understanding (a constant work), and other-understanding.
That understanding comes through stories, not Wikipedia.
So thank you, my co-worker, for your generous questions, and your generous answers. You did something magical. You moved Juneteenth from a concept and made it personal.
Lincoln didn’t free the slaves, the soldiers did. And now, over 150 years later, we all still do this work.
One by one, we set humans free of ignorance, other-ing, and isolation.
Want to know more?
Talk to people with lived experience.
Ask them about their story.
And yes, do some reading: