I wrote this for a presentation I made to commemorate Juneteenth. Many people are confused about exactly what is being celebrated, and how the celebration – or lack thereof – continues to shape my walk through the world, sometimes hopefully and sometimes despairingly, but never losing sight of how I am enslaved to a great many things.
First thing I want to let you know is how Juneteenth, and how repetitive patterns of racism and xenophobia have shaped the world we live in. I want to show you how those patterns have intersected with my life and made me who I am today. All of that reduced to about a 3rd grade level ‘cause that’s what I can handle.
In 1803, Congress passed an Immigration Act that banned the importation of Blacks into the United States. The irony of that in a country that was engaged in active chattel slavery notwithstanding, it was nonetheless passed. Why? Mainly because of the Haitian Revolution, which had declared Haiti a free Black nation, and any Blacks who came there were immediately free. What would it mean if large numbers of Blacks flooded into the United States and asserted they were free? Worse, what if they told enslaved people on our plantations they could be free as well?
When they banned the importation of Black people in 1803, it was a pushback against Haiti for asserting its own sovereignty. That infuriated France no end, because the new Haitian constitution also restricted white people from owning land there. They sought to put an end to the colonial European practice of building sugar plantations in Haiti, where France profited exorbitantly but Haiti…a bit less. After the revolution, Haiti decided it did not want to have a future that resembled the colonial social order in perpetuity, so it decreed that white people could not become property owners there. In addition to declaring all Black people free once they set foot on the island, colonial-minded Europeans found all of this quite problematic. The French responded by calling in Haiti’s marker for all the money that had been given to develop the sugar processing industry there. Haiti, of course, had no way of acquiring that kind of capital so they began decimating their social services and educational infrastructure in order to begin payment, and they have never recovered from that. That’s why Haiti is still one of the poorest nations on the planet. But anyway, the U.S. responded by closing its borders to Haitian immigrants because Black people were not free here, and we didn’t want free Black people telling enslaved Black people how to get out of their shackles. Pushback is real, and it goes on and on.
So let’s look at the same tactics being utilized today with respect to immigration. We have to keep these blood thirsty terroristic criminals out of our country, protect our women and children (and our stuff). They said the same thing about Blacks back in the day. These LatinX people came in here illegally and they are bringing drugs and killing our people and taking over (because a very bad former President allowed it) and we have to stop that. They are eating dogs and cats. They have to go. We don’t care where they go TO, they just have to go. Right now. Not a moment to waste.
This is pushback for DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) – and for all of the asylum seekers given resident status. Further in that same vein, cuts to Medicaid that are looming now have less to do with corruption and waste than pushback for the Affordable Care Act, and the audacity of a Black man to sit in the White House. But that’s another story.
The current emphasis on an exaggerated urgency for deportation is page 4 in the white supremacist authoritarian playbook. It is nothing new. When times are tough for Americans, for whatever reason, it has to be somebody’s fault. Repeatedly, it is the fault of people of color, the not-so-original scapegoats. The film Birth Of A Nation starts off saying that everything was fine in America until the Africans came. Interesting, because the Africans didn’t exactly come here on vacation as tourists or anything, they were drug over here in chains to provide free labor for plantations. Whose fault is that?
LatinX people showed up here voluntarily, or often as desperate refugees, because 1) we all told them it is a great place to come because we are the greatest nation in the world, 2) they could live better here than in their home country, and 3) we broke our own laws on many fronts by giving them jobs under the table, paying them menial wages (as close to free labor as business owners could get away with), and not having to worry about stuff like health care. Once again, we provided the motive, the means, and the opportunity then punished the victims. Even before the nightmare of ICE, the immigration law said those without properly documented citizenship were to be immediately deported, and – as people have been screaming for years – sent back to wherever they came from. OK, but I don’t think many of them came from places like Libya, where they are now trying to deport some of the migrants. Keep in mind that the abolition of enslavement in this country does not include the incarcerated. But I digress.
After the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, it only applied to those pesky and rebellious Southern states. If you were enslaved in New York, nothing changed for you. Technically, what ended the institution of chattel slavery was the 14th Amendment, which also gave citizenship to more recent generations of Blacks via the birthright citizenship provision. Fast forward to this year, when the President wants to challenge birthright citizenship in order to keep millions of immigrants from becoming citizens. If you’re a citizen, you could do horrible things like run for Congress and become a lawmaker, or worse become the governor of a state. You could have systemic power, and we can’t have that. Once again, the oppressor chooses the narrative, and it has never changed in the case of non-white immigrants. Right.
The story[GU1] [GU2] of the Emancipation Proclamation, as taught to many of us back in the day, said that benevolent President Lincoln freed the slaves by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and that was a very good thing. I have no doubt that it was a very good thing, but it’s an over simplified and single story that doesn’t quite do it justice. I don’t know if Abraham Lincoln was a personal fan of chattel slavery or not, but he did not issue the Emancipation Proclamation solely for the benefit of enslaved people. He did it to enhance his efforts to rebuild the Union. It was a strategic weapon that was intended to cripple the South economically by removing their source of free labor. THAT’S ALL. There was no plan to reconcile the liberated Blacks into American society, there was no plan at that point to make them citizens, and there was no plan to make their lives any better. 40 acres and a mule rarely materialized, and sharecropping was…not all it was cracked up to be. The plan really went only as far as reconstituting the republic and doing away with the Confederacy.
The really interesting thing about the Emancipation Proclamation, though, is it only applied to the rebellious Southern states. If you were enslaved in New York, your status had not changed. By the time June 19, 1865 rolled around it was only the final implementation of the Emancipation Proclamation. That Proclamation, which I liken to an Executive Order today, did not end the institution of chattel slavery. The celebration is for the literal emancipation of hundreds of thousands of enslaved people in the Southern states, which was an incredible moment, but there was still much that had to be done before chattel slavery was truly behind us.
By the time Union Army General Gordon Granger set foot on Galveston Island in 1865 to advise that enslaved people were emancipated, it was 2 years after the fact. Land owners would now have to pay for the labor of those who tended the crops, picked the cotton, tended their babies, cooked their meals, shod the horses, and milked the cows. But the institutional structure of chattel slavery was unaltered, and the law had not caught up. What brought manumission to the remaining enslaved people across the country was passage of the 13th Amendment at the end of 1865. By that time, Abraham Lincoln was already dead and the Civil War had ended. It was the final exclamation point of the Emancipation Proclamation, but that’s all it was. There was more upheaval for the social order in America on its way.
Passage of the 14th Amendment is what formally ended the institution of chattel slavery, and that did not come until 1868. Enslaved people may have been liberated, but their lives were still more than torturous. Most could not read or write, still had no idea of where they really were, and had no way of acquiring capital (or even avoiding lynching and murder just for being there.) The plan was that laborers had to be paid a wage, but nobody advocated for them or held their employers accountable. Landowners graciously allowed them to stay and work on the land as they had always done, but if they received a wage it was a pittance. In some cases, the newly liberated people were charged room and board for being allowed to stay there as sharecroppers. Again, the formerly enslaved had no idea of what was fair or what was due them so they took what was offered, if it was. The South was distracted with recovering from the ravages of war, so in many cases people just kept on doing what they had been doing. Some of the newly liberated did set out to the Midwest and the Southwest, but the odds of a successful journey were not good.
So, it’s very similar to current times, when LatinX immigrants make their way down the Rio Grande and find themselves bussing tables or washing dishes in an American restaurant for $2 an hour. They have no recourse for unfair labor practices because they are undocumented, but there is also no penalty for the restaurant owner who enables the arrangement. Likewise, migrant workers who are hired by farmers to harvest crops often get menial wages, and if/when they are deported, the farmer suffers no consequence for hiring undocumented workers. They can just hire others.
What I get out of all this is that people who are not members of the dominant culture in this country – meaning not European descended American born cis-gendered heterosexual Christian people – really have not seen the desired outcome of all this Constitution amending, assassination-inducing, political hot potato tossing that’s been going on. What has been seen is pushback for every bit of progress made to change the narrative of Blacks in America. At one time, the desired outcome was called freedom.
So here I come. Still sitting in the back of bus, still having to use the back door or colored entrance to some places. The Civil Rights era was ramping up, but I was little and what did I know? I was raised with rules like this:
- THE CLOSER YOU ARE TO WHITE, THE CLOSER YOU ARE TO RIGHT BUT IF YOU BLACK, GET BACK.
- DON’T DRAW ATTENTION TO YOURSELF. YOU’LL BE SINGLED OUT LATER AND IT WON’T BE FOR ANYTHING GOOD.
My birth certificate says “Negro” – that’s how old I am – and where I come from the State would do genealogical research FOR you to find out if there was any Negro blood flowing through your veins; one drop was enough, and you were assigned the race THEY said. No passin’ allowed, or as we called it passe’ blanc. What they put on your birth certificate used to be “colored”, and for a little while it was “Mulatto”, but all the same, if you weren’t white, you knew that before you were potty trained. And you understood there were certain rules for you and certain rules for white people and they didn’t always match up. I am more than any of that, but I didn’t learn until much later that the oppressor always gets to choose the narrative.
The narrative of a single story, from a single perspective, is limiting and frequently inaccurate. It is not the first time America has tried to codify what it means to be an American, what an American looks like, and what an American talks like.
Years ago, when I was attending the launch of Black Lives of UU at GA, we were broken into small groups to discuss several questions. One of the questions was “Are we free?” I was in a group of Black UUs, mostly women, and we huddled together to talk about this issue of freedom. I, brilliant mind that I am, said authoritatively (ok, pompously), well of course we are free. There’s the 13th Amendment, and the 14th, and even the 15th that have established our freedom. Other women in the group, however, were not so sure, and most of them said they did not feel as though freedom had come to pass. More than one sai\d we have just changed the face of the “Master” but we are still not truly free. We can sit at the front of the bus, but there are still a number of places we are not free to go,, certain opportunities not afforded us. We are not really free to show our full selves without constant judgement of how far we stray from the so-called normalcy of the dominant culture..
Reflecting on this later, I remembered being a new hire of Wachovia in Columbia SC. It was 1998, and the Confederate flag was still perched atop the State House in Columbia (they didn’t put that in my relo packet). My new manager was showing me some of the sights of the city as we came back from lunch one day. Driving down I26, he pointed out the exit for the zoo (which is a very nice one) and a few other attractions I might want to check out. Then he pointed to a particular exit, and turned to look at me directly (even though he was driving) and said, “I’m just letting you know they still have Klan meetings back in there, and sometimes cross burnings, so I’m just telling you that you probably don’t want to go exploring back there on your own.”
Then I remembered growing up in New Orleans, where everybody in my neighborhood knew there were certain places you were not welcome, certain places that could be hazardous to your health, and you knew better than to push it. In 1971, I went to a private school where there were 64 girls in my 6th grade class, and only 7 of us were Black. I honestly don’t remember any Latina students there at all. Regardless, it made me step in very hesitantly at 11, to this place where people didn’t laugh loudly or talk loudly like I was used to, and they had *maids* to pick up after us. I heard more than my fair share of ignorant comments, got called the n-word a few times, wasn’t invited to a number of parties, so I started to get the picture. But I had no idea how to respond or take that in. It was 1971…and school integration was still a fairly new thing. Even the good Ursuline sisters messed up from time to time…there was one very old nun who used to stroll confusedly around the carport, where parents retrieved their children at day’s end, and regularly muttered “Oh, look – the Negroes are even driving big cars now!”
So yeah, there are still places where I don’t feel “free” to go. Places that still cost. I went to that new school, which academically was a better place than where I was, but I gave up a place in my community. My neighborhood grew up and had shared experiences without me. I was now having shared experiences with people very different from me, and that was disconcerting because there were some parts missing, namely the shared experience of a common socioeconomic experience. To this day, some overlook what my birth certificate says and where I grew up, as if they can just erase parts of my identity and say “But you’re not like…them.”
When you rotate in predominantly white circles, you can lose a lot of your individuality; you often represent your entire race, you are often called to speak for people who can very well speak for themselves. For instance, we may be told that we are not free to wear natural hair styles, that it is not professional or appropriate. We maybe told that loud and boisterous behavior is threatening. We maybe told that using vernacular you have used your entire life is judged racist and disquieting for members of the majority culture. We may be called upon to explain the behavior of others, or to educate. There is n more time for that…ask Ahmaud Arbery how free he was to go jogging on a public street in Georgia. Ask Sandra Bland how free she was to step out of her car after a traffic stop. Ask Tamir Rice how free he was to play with a toy gun at the playground. But we can’t ask these people if any of the rules have changed because they are all dead, unarmed victims of armed law enforcement action, victims of a single story that informs a police officer of what a threat to life looks like.
So what exactly is freedom? Maybe that’s what all of us well-meaning people need to figure out, and make sure we are not perpetuating the status quo because it’s easier, safer, and less confrontational. The next step is to make sure we are leveraging our privilege by not merely being non-racists but pushing ourselves to be anti-racists. I know that I cannot change the heart, or the mind, or the perception of those who do not see things as I do. What I can do, however, is stand in my integrity to say this is not the world I want to live in, this is not how I live my faith, this is not how I am supposed to treat people when I affirm their inherent worth and dignity. Sometimes I fail, but I have to at least make the effort to be accountable for that.
We’ve come a long way in this Fellowship, and that truly is a great and wonderful thing. Anti-racism may be work that is not ever complete, because it’s a lifelong process of unlearning and growing, and making new paths where there were none before. It’s a process of acknowledging that we here today have certain privilege – for me, I am American-born and college-educated (believe it or not). I can leverage that as I walk in the world by using those advantages to make a way toward level ground.
There are many intersections of my identity groups, so learning about the inherent privilege and access to power there is the key to me becoming whole. I am not there yet, and the journey to get there is really uncomfortable. I get my feelings hurt, I stumble and fall, say stupid things, mistrust people, and forget that people can change. I don’t remember where I came from. But for better or worse, I keep coming back to try again. I was told the key to having a long relationship is that you just don’t leave.
So, I’m still standing, and so are you. Where do we go from here? I believe that…if…we are ready to screw up repeatedly and start again, if we are really committed to the vision of building a beloved community. If we are unwavering and unafraid to stay here, and to let the light from our ancestors shine. If we do all of that, that work is what’s going to make us whole let us love the hell out of this crazy, mixed-up, imperfect, chaotic, and sometimes cruel world.
I hope I’ve opened a small window into how it is to be me, walking in this world. How it is to be a perfectly flawed person of color trying to figure out how to turn on the lights. For all of us doing this very hard work of reconciling with ourselves and each other, I say, celebrate the small victories where you can. Be generous with your joy, because joy is itself an act of resistance to the unacceptable. Don’t ever let the unacceptable become normal. ‘Cause the clock is ticking and ain’t nobody got time for all that other mess.
The Sound Hole 