Tag: race

On Juneteenth

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.

Virginia Election 2021

Yesterday’s Virginia election results were disheartening, but also show the path to build a consistent foundation of liberal victories lies in building across racial divisions, minority and majority. We need to evolve racial perspectives further toward understanding and harmony.

We have a large number of people we have vilified, who have also vilified us. We can’t expect to win elections unless we give them a better story than what they’re getting from right wing media, or even our own media!

What I’m saying is, and this is going to be the hot take that seems controversial, while at the same time for our democracy, and even for liberal ideas, is necessary – we have to get better at reaching out to white people with our message. Even Trumpers. Even “deplorables”.

The values of liberal ideas, open ethical government, and a social safety net should be made accessible to all because they are beneficial to all. UBI, Universal Healthcare, Public Education, and other programs don’t just benefit minorities, they benefit everyone.

I think that messaging gets lost. I think demanding everyone to fully check and understand their privilege before stepping to the left makes the chasm too wide. We first have to reach out to people where they are, then we can bring them with us. Process, not revelation.

To build a party open to all is to figure out how to stand with those who have been hostile to us. Who have hurt us in some way. We have to protect ourselves, but we also have to heal ourselves, then others. We have to live and model a better way.

About the “N word”.

I’m going to talk about the “N word” a moment.
 
It’s a word of hate. A word of oppression. A word of separation. It has peers — words used to describe other races, nationalities, ethnic groups, sexualities, and gender identities which should never be used to describe others, yet the word and its ilk live on, and will likely continue to in some form for the duration of language and the differentiation of one person to another.
 
Here’s the thing:
 
Sometimes, among the descendants of its victims, the word is a form of bonding, and a part of the culture resulting from enslavement and segregation. From generations of being told they are lesser. From being told what they can and cannot do. From being told what things are supposed to mean.
 
Many of the comments I’ve read resulting from this video, and a sentiment I’ve seen and heard expressed in some form all of my life, is that the word should never be spoken by anyone. That the word would have died out long ago if black people stopped saying it. That it’s ok for others to say it because black people say it to each other.
 
The irony of this sentiment is: if only for a brief moment, in having the roles switched, in being told there is something non-blacks cannot do that black people can, they are experiencing the smallest slight upon their own self-expression and rights which black people experienced hundred-fold for centuries. The anger in their comments, the sense of injustice felt, should give them a sense of the strain and powerlessness blacks have felt in having their destinies dictated to them.
 
So if you are upset about one word you are told not to say, one word which means something different when you say it than when others do, and you’re demanding to be treated with equality — maybe that’s the lesson. These were people who were ascribed that word and meaning to them by others. Black people had no control over what it meant. Taking back that word is taking back the means to define themselves, or at least dull the memory of its original intent.
 
As I said earlier, the n-word is not alone. It has brethren used to describe anyone different — white, black, man, woman, gay, straight, etc. Socially, the rules are different on what can be said without insult depending on your own group identification. Personally, I acknowledge there are some words which would have a worse meaning coming from me than from others. That’s the nature of these words. For me to try to force the victim of one of these words to never say it is adding insult to the injury.
 
It is best to leave the words which don’t apply to you alone. There are plenty of better words in life to think about.

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