Add an Essay About a Coffee Table to Your (Ongoing) Juneteenth Reading
And keep reading and learning throughout the year
The day after Juneteenth could be any other day on the calendar. But it is an opportunity to continue reading and learning long after the celebrations. While some Americans are lucky enough to have enjoyed a paid day off, injustice abounds in “the land of the free”.
During the dark days of the quarantine, I heard an OPB interview with a Multnomah County Library manager, Kirby McCurtis. (Support public media!) She talked about the importance of building Black fiction and stories about Black joy into your anti-racist non-fiction reading. While it is crucial to continue learning about our country’s racist history and staying informed about our ongoing structural and social inequalities and inequities, we also need to avoid pigeonholing Black people by reducing them to trauma porn.
McCurtis’s recommendation and insight showcase an important dimension of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s humanitarian lesson from her viral TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story”.
“Don’t think that you can’t learn or grow just by reading non-fiction,” McCurtis reassures us that learning opportunities abound in fiction, too. You can listen to the whole interview here.
People are complex. Black people are not solely defined by their experiences with racism. Read Ross Gay. Start with The Book of Delights. Then read The Book of (More) Delights.
And read Andrew Jazprose Hill, whose recent piece tackles injustice while celebrating the necessity of beauty. “Why I Love My Fake Noguchi Coffee Table” tells the incredible story of a furniture designer I’d never heard of, “the only person to enter an internment camp voluntarily,” his personal triumph over adversities, and how we can all seek transcendence.
“And what is intuition but another way of describing transcendence and/or the Holy Spirit,” Hill asks.
This is not mere whimsy or armchair philosophy. Hill connects Noguchi’s inspiration to Beethoven, Catholic Cardinals choosing the new pope during conclave, and Maya Angelou. Hill isn’t just tracing through lines; he shows us how to create our own.
“We need not be defined by any force that seeks to deny that,” Hill says of the universality of the human condition.
Who are your favorite Black novelists? Afrofuturists? Essayists? Poets? Afrofuturists?
Book bans, education cuts, and attacks on all things DEI are exacerbating how little we are taught about our gruesome history, when we need to be learning more about the political and economic reality of human beings enslaving other human beings. We need to read about and understand how the legacy of “hereditary, race-based chattel slavery” lives on in racist confrontations by Karens, housing market discrimination, job discrimination, environmental racism, police brutality, and the criminal justice system.
We must also read what breaks our hearts.
Author and Medium favorite William Spivey’s “The Very First Juneteenth: June 19, 1865; What Really Happened When Texas Slaves Were Freed” dispels some abiding myths. And its history of violence is American history.
Spivey documents the plantation owners and Texas legislators who tried to outrun the Union Army by moving west with the people they still wanted to own.
“Many, if not most, enslaved people knew about the Proclamation. They also knew it required them to reach a free state, a Union military base, or a contraband camp to have a hope of attaining freedom,” Spivey wrote.
The perilous journey of formerly enslaved people to places that actually complied with the Emancipation Proclamation all too often resulted in the violent deaths of people who had just begun to hope. Those who survived continued to struggle to secure housing, employment, and their safety. That struggle continues today in modern America.
“When you picture thousands of happy slaves finally freed. Think also of those hanging after being shot on the banks of the Sabine River, as a symbol of what happened to those seeking freedom after Juneteenth,” Spivey concludes.
Read Dr. Allison Wiltz’s “Juneteenth Brought Freedom But Not Equal Rights for Americans”. It’s an infuriating chronicle of numerous ways formerly enslaved people continued to be disenfranchised and persecuted after the Emancipation Proclamation.
“Those of us commemorating the holiday in the modern era should be mindful that the promise of racial equality remained unfulfilled,” Dr. Wiltz writes as “one era of racial injustice gave way to another.”
She reminds/teaches readers that a year after Juneteenth, Texas amended its Code of Criminal Procedure. “Black people could not testify in court except when the ‘prosecution is against a person who is a person of color.’ This meant they could not testify against White people, granting them a level of impunity to commit crimes without fear of punishment.”
She explains how many formerly enslaved people continued to work for the people who had enslaved them because employment options were dire. Newly freed Black people couldn’t negotiate for equal pay to white people, let alone fair wages. They could lose wages just for trying to change jobs.
“Some of America’s most popular companies continue to exploit the loophole in the 13th Amendment, which permits ‘involuntary servitude’ as punishment for those convicted of a crime, to turn a profit. Cheap Black labor is still exploited in America, generations after abolition, undeterred by this change in status,” Dr. Wiltz clarifies the post-Emancipation economic reality while also mentioning that “the Black-White wealth has remained unchanged” or only slightly increased in more than 50 years for non-incarcerated Americans.
Read civil rights attorney and prolific writer Qasim Rashid. His body of work makes it clear that legality never has been and never should be our metric for justice. And he echoes Dr. Wiltz’s criticism of the modern criminal “justice” system.
“ … slavery still exists in America today — within the prison system. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime. And that exception created a pipeline from plantation slavery to prison slavery, where today, incarcerated people — disproportionately Black and brown — are forced to work for pennies on the dollar. Meanwhile, the private prison industry has become a multi-billion dollar empire, profiting from modern-day enslavement. That’s not justice. That’s not freedom. That’s human trafficking and white supremacy by another name,” Rashid wrote on his Substack, “Let’s Address This”.
Race-based persecution is vast and entrenched. But the advocacy of smart, compassionate people is formidable.
Those taking the time to share their talent, insight, education, and experience are most often the ones victimized by institutionalized racism. They incur the double burden of dismantling oppressive systems and beliefs while trying not to be consumed or destroyed by them. They are doing so for the greater good, but that advocacy comes at the expense of their emotional and psychological labor. Make no mistake, it is work. And it’s not fair.
“I write about racism, but there are so many other things I would like to write about instead. Help me dismantle racism so that I can get to that,” says writer Zuri Stevens in her About Me.
My fellow white people, the very least we can do is take the time, with heart, and a wide-open mind, to read, keep learning, and share the work of those taking the time to teach us everything we never learned in school, and all of the obstacles we don’t have to navigate in our personal or professional lives.
Whether Black people would rather be doing astrophysics and cosmology like Kihana Wilson, making people laugh like innumerable comics, or just living a quiet, private life, no one should have to dedicate their existence to dismantling historical oppression they didn’t create.
In Dr. Wiltz’s words, “As we enjoy music and BBQ with friends on this joyous occasion, we should consider not just how far we’ve come as a nation, but also how far we’ve yet to travel.”