Honoring Juneteenth with another step on my lifelong learning journey: I didn’t know that the belated news of freedom wasn’t really being proclaimed to enslaved people in Texas on June 19, 1865. It was actually a warning from the Union Army “directed toward recalcitrant slaveholders,” as Isabel Wilkerson and others report.

That is, the enslavers already KNEW but they REFUSED… up until the very moment they were faced with a greater armed force than what they themselves wielded against the people they had violently enslaved.

And upon reflection, do we really believe that people who were resourceful, strong, resilient, clever enough to survive chattel slavery for twelve generations truly didn’t have ways of knowing what was going on beyond their slave labor camps? That the story is as simple as “Those Black people were ignorant until the heroic White people came to save them”? HMMMM.

Once again, our (my fellow White people’s) understanding of Black history conveniently tends to invisibilize White supremacy. We celebrate Black freedom but we rarely ask — or even, like right now with the Critical Race Theory battles, try to legally forbid asking — “freedom from what, freedom from whom?”

I’m sorry to say, it didn’t fully dawn on me until a few years ago that the story of the 1960’s Civil Rights movement isn’t just about Black people; it’s about White people who were hell-fucking-bent on denying those civil rights. By assassinating Black leaders. By bombing Black churches. By lynching Black children. By conducting a campaign of terrorism at such scale that our nation had to repeatedly call out its military forces to subdue White supremacy.

So, yes. Today I celebrate Juneteenth even more, because I have learned even more about how hard White supremacy fought to prevent it from ever happening… in 1865, in 1965, and today.