Look, y’all. There’s a lot I want to say about Juneteenth; I’ll be honoring the day on Monday by taking time to write up a memory that’s on my heart. But as I’m seeing more posts and news stories in the run-up, I just cannot keep quiet about this: Saying it’s “the day enslaved people got the news of freedom” misses the point, in the exact way that us white folks loooove to miss this particular point.

The point is this. “Even though the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 and the Confederate army surrendered to the Union army in April 1865, enslaved people in Texas — the westernmost Confederate state — could not exercise their freedom until June 19, 1865. On that date, Union General Gordon Granger led some 2,000 Union troops, many of whom were Black, into Galveston Bay, where they announced that the more than 250,000 enslaved Black people in the state were free by executive decree.” That’s what the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture says about it.

Do you see the problem yet?

You don’t need an army of 2,000 soldiers to tell enslaved people that they’re now free.

You need an army to tell ENSLAVERS that the people they enslaved are now free.

As a white woman, I missed this point for most of my life. It wasn’t until maybe six years ago, watching PBS’s “Eyes on the Prize” documentary, that I realized: Ohhhh, the history of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s isn’t just a glorious, inspiring tale of Black people fighting for their rights.

The Civil Rights movement is also a terrible, damning history of white people fighting for white supremacy.

Again and again, we lift up stories of Black people fighting slavery and segregation. As we should. But… it wouldn’t be a fight if there wasn’t anybody on the other side. We conveniently invisibilize the stunningly obvious fact that these are stories of white people, too. White people fighting for their supposed right to continue owning and oppressing people of color.

The struggle of Black people was never against some abstract legal code. It was always against real, live white people who bombed, lynched, beat, and burned to keep their power. White people who – just to give one example – made it necessary for our government to once again mobilize a literal army of 30,000 National Guard troops at Ole Miss in 1962, to protect Black people who were daring to demand the freedom that it had taken another army to announce, nearly a century before.

Focusing on the “yay good news” aspect of Juneteenth allows us to avoid seeing how racial injustice in this country actually works.

And now I need to say: my point isn’t that white folks should feel bad or guilty about what people who look like us did. I didn’t enslave people; you didn’t set dogs on lunch-counter protesters; yep yep yep, that wasn’t us.

But whenever we fail to honor the truth of our shared history – whether by intention or inattention – how can we hope to build the future we want? The past is the foundation for the future. We have to know the land we build on. (Which is, by the way, stolen land, but that’s for a different post.)

By all means, let’s celebrate Juneteenth. Freedom is beautiful and worthy of celebration.

That’s why I want us to celebrate the *full* meaning of the day. That kind of celebration is what frees us from the half-truths that keep us from building something better.

Onwards, friends. And happy Juneteenth to all.