Today is Juneteenth. Several people who aren’t Black Americans descended from slaves have asked me to how to celebrate Juneteenth, and I haven’t really had a good answer for them. I know many will tell me it’s not my place to do this labor for them. Yet, as I get older, I see fewer people like me willing to do so. If we don’t share our stories and perspective with others, no one else will, so I’ll take a swing at this. Bear in mind, this is my perspective. I’m not writing this in a stone tablet for you, it’s just a suggestion.

To me, Juneteenth is a holiday where we as Black Americans descended from slaves gather to recognize where we come from and celebrate each other, our lives, our stories, and what we have done with the freedoms we have won and continue to fight for.

Even writing about Juneteenth in today’s culture is loaded with weight from media intended to obscure truth and actively fight against empathy. Empathy doesn’t mean you have to feel guilt over things you didn’t do. It just means you can feel compassion for people experiencing something you don’t. When I look at things like the so-called war on woke, I see it really as a war on empathy.

Woke is a term I first heard in the 90s, and I didn’t understand it at first. I was raised in a predominantly white area. My family largely assimilated, at least in public, to what we consider attributes of whiteness as a matter of survival. Woke was not something said in my family home. In public schools, we didn’t talk about historical redlining. We didn’t talk about current racially discriminatory education funding, voting districts or any number of the issues regarding racial inequality that were currently happening. We talked about it like it was a thing of some long bygone past. Moreover, in my school, we didn’t really talk about Africa. In World Geography we simply didn’t cover it because “we ran out of time”. We didn’t talk about things to the point we could not recognize the continued institutional racism we were still experiencing. It was only when I stepped out of that bubble, gained other perspectives, and learned more about history from more truthful sources, did I learn about the true history and current state of racism.

I struggle to think about how anyone can celebrate the freedom of another without empathy, without the basic ability to place yourself in the life and perspective of another. I’m not saying you have to be Woke to get there, but it starts with empathy. You have to be open to see the world through the perspective of another.

I was raised in a rural mostly white community in southwestern Virginia. The family who raised me was black, but we had taken on so much to assimilate into white culture as a matter of survival the things I learned at school weren’t really questioned. My family didn’t spend a lot of time talking about redlining. We didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the massive institutional forces that we had struggled against. Instead, we just did the things that we had to do to make ends meet, and my grandfather was particularly good at this.

My grandfather was charismatic, wise, not necessarily book smart – he had an eighth grade education from a segregated school – but he was a lifelong learner. He read the newspaper every day and moreover he talked to people. Through my grandfather’s lifetime he experienced violence, but he also moved the needle for our family. My uncle was the first black baby born on a regular floor in our hospital and not in the basement. My grandfather owned land and houses, and rented those houses out to others. He valued education, and put my uncle and my mom through college and got my aunt started on her life. Then my grandfather helped raise me in a world that had vastly changed from the one he grew up in.

It’s hard for me to talk about Juneteenth without thinking about my grandfather because he also hosted parties at our home for the black community as reunions for the old segregated school that he, my uncle, and my mother attended. Those celebrations usually lined up with Juneteenth. When I was growing up we didn’t celebrate Juneteenth for the sake of being Juneteenth, we gathered together as a community to celebrate each other, the successes that we were finding, and our ability to get educated to move the needle for the next generation.

There also wasn’t a commercial aspect of Juneteenth, there’s not a Santa June who’s going to come around and give your kids presents. We didn’t have the recognition with vacation time, or corporate ads, or special Juneteenth colorways of stuff to buy. It was just the gathering of family and community.

This weekend in my hometown in rural Virginia, someone of my generation pulled together a black community reunion like we had when we were kids. My mother, my uncle, and my aunt attended, took pictures, and saw people they hadn’t seen in years. They shared those pictures and stories with us through social media. Living across the country now, I missed it, and I’m sad I did, because to me Juneteenth is that celebration of community, of gathering to recognize where you’ve been, where you are, and where you’re going. I really want to give a shout out to my old friend Greg who planned that. That is the best way to celebrate Juneteenth, and I don’t know how to share any of that with people who haven’t experienced it quite the way we do in the black community, aside from suggesting that if you’re invited, show up with humility, empathy, and curiosity.

I also talked to my six year old son about Juneteenth for the first time in a way that he could potentially begin to understand his connection to it. We watched a very kid friendly video on Juneteenth and slavery on YouTube. We talked about what a slave was, what they did, and a little of what their lives were like. Then I worked my way up our family tree through my mother’s line with stories, back to my great great grandparents who were slaves – and one slave owner. Being a six year old, he took it in with the aloofness of a child who doesn’t completely understand the severity and complexity of the world. I reflect on that both as a blessing, but also as a first step. As he grows older, as he learns more, as his own ignorance slips away, he will eventually become an adult who has to reason, who has to think about the consequences of his actions, and who has to try and be a good, compassionate, empathetic human being in the world. So today was step one for my son and understanding Juneteenth.

I would say if you want to work to recognize and celebrate Juneteenth, and have no other way, start at my son’s step one. Watch a video on YouTube, read a book, talk to a friend, do something to educate yourself and remove a little bit of ignorance about it from your mind. Reach for empathy and spend some time with it. If you can’t make the cookout, or even if you do, it can’t hurt.