I’ll be honest. This is the first year I have really *cared* about Juneteenth, which celebrates the end of “legal” enslavement of people in America as Union troops arrived to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas… two years after its signing, but better late than never, huh? Last June, like every year since I first learned about this holiday when I worked in a community of color, if you pressed me I’d have said yes, of course it’s worth celebrating, how nice. But over the past several months, I’ve been what might be called obsessed with learning the real history of race and racism in America. But I personally don’t think I’m obsessed. I think of it as trying belatedly to catch up as quickly as possible after decades of being mis-taught and oblivious. So, as I sit here today on Juneteenth, listening to audio of crying brown children in American internment camps taken “legally” from their families – AS WE HAVE DONE SO MANY TIMES BEFORE – I think of a William Faulkner quote whose truth I am just learning to understand: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Yes, he may have been problematic. But then again, so have I.

By the way, happy to share my reading list if you’re interested in the path I’ve been on recently. In particular, The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson and The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein have rocked my world to its foundations.