It's About Time
“That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.”
I didn’t know about Juneteenth.
Not as a boy growing up in the late 1960’s in suburban Lakewood, Colorado. Not as a college student at the Eastman School of Music and the University of Miami in the 1980’s. Not as a young jazz musician in New York City in the 1990’s. It wasn’t highlighted on the news, or taught in school. To my knowledge, my parents never mentioned it either. They weren’t much for secular holidays. And rather than reliving the past, we were raised to look to the future.
Like many black families before them, my parents migrated westward in search of new opportunities. I don’t recall the precise allure of Colorado, but I know my father admired the vistas, and the clear mountain air, thinner at altitude, must have held the possibility of achieving escape velocity – for himself, and for his children – past the reach of discrimination, prejudice, and the dead weight of deferred dreams.
Once we arrived, my parents committed themselves to shaping our trajectory – good schools, music lessons, church, little league, the chance to travel to places they would never see. They taught us self-reliance – to strive constantly and to go it alone if necessary. They insisted that we respect others and ourselves. They informed us that we stood on the shoulders of generations who had suffered and persevered, that we owed them a debt that we would need to repay through excellence and integrity. They instructed us to look to individuals whose character and accomplishments could be a compass guiding our own efforts, and never to follow the crowd – as they couldn’t be trusted not to lead us off a cliff.
What my parents didn’t do was dwell on our enslaved past – not in a white world that was only too keen to remind us of that legacy should we threaten their image as top-dogs. I know now they were trying to spare us, to lessen the baggage that we would have to carry.
It was in Portland that I was introduced to Juneteenth – ironically by way of writer John F. Callahan, biographer and literary executor for the author Ralph Ellison. Shortly after moving to town I was invited to do a series of concerts in conjunction with readings of the book, which Callahan, a professor at Lewis and Clark University, had edited from Ellison’s two-thousand pages of unfinished manuscript into the novel he thought his late friend would have wanted.
So my perspective on Juneteenth is colored by that complex and protracted work of historically-informed fiction that Ellison worked on for forty years – and never finished.
As I reflect on this history today, what comes to my mind is not celebration, it’s time.
The milliseconds it takes a police officer to decide to pull the trigger on an unarmed black man;
the years it has taken for my city to decide that a holiday celebrating the end of slavery is worth adding to the civic calendar;
the decades it has taken for multinational corporations to decide that perpetuating 400-year-old racial stereotypes is not good business;
the generations it will take to raise up enough black school teachers, psychotherapists, Olympic skiers, environmental scientists, NFL owners, college professors, race car drivers, and prima ballerinas that none of those vocations seem the slightest bit incongruous with blackness – to anyone;
And the fact that it took two years, five months, and nineteen days from the day Lincoln declared the slaves free, until the last of the slaveholding states in this country was forced to accept this reality – before the bell rang, signaled the end of round one.
In comparison, the twenty-four days since the killing of George Floyd seems like no time at all. Yet, look at all there has been time for: protesting, counter-protesting, reflection, rage, rioting, revolt, self-examination, excoriation, denial, discussion, looting, donating, educating, testifying, tweeting, organizing, revelation, legal action, anguish, insults, memes, solidarity, compassion, chanting, singing, marching, lying, and even more dying.
There has been enough time to witness the reality of systemic racism dawning on my white friends and colleagues, and to see in some the painful recognition of their privilege, even as others exercise their prerogative to turn a blind eye to the price that this privilege extracts from others.
There has been time to unearth the dark stories that have been suppressed. To acknowledge that before Ferguson and Minneapolis, there were Tulsa and Rosewood and East St. Louis. Before there was “Stand Your Ground,” there were The Black Codes and redlining, and these wounds are being cauterized with burning police cars, broken windows, marching feet, and cries of rage. There has been time to see icons toppled, and to expose the painful contradictions buried beneath the pediments erected to venerate our country's founding myths.
James Baldwin said, “Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.” That we have chosen this arbitrary measure as a rationale for withholding respect, resources, and power is as absurd as it is destructive. But the truth is that its ramifications are not going to be erased by protests.
It will take time.
Time to remove our tendencies to categorize, prejudge, and discriminate. Time to come to grips with the reality that this week’s renunciation of oppressive symbols will demand that we call out those that remain over the coming months and years. It will take time to deal with the “invisible elephant”– the legacy of colonialism that Native American scholar Julie Cordero-Lamb wrote about hearing a white colleague address in a recent Facebook post.
"[It] assumes that every people but white Americans are ‘other,’ and that we have no culture, when the underlying fact is that our culture is so dominant that we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking it’s the neutral state of human culture against which all others are foreign. Even the Black people our ancestors abducted and enslaved we treat as somehow more foreign than ourselves. And, most absurdly, the peoples who are indigenous to this land are told that we belong here more than they do."
It will take time to process the reality that equity means actively shifting power, resources & opportunity from privileged places to marginalized places. And to figure out how to create the deep, authentic relationships across all categories of difference that ensure that our success is mutually bound up with the success of those whom we now call “other.”
The poet James Weldon Johnson wrote the opening lines of what we now call the Negro National Anthem in 1899, thirty-four years after the first Juneteenth.
“Lift Every Voice and Sing.
Till Earth and Heaven Ring!”
It’s been one hundred-fifty-seven years, five months, nineteen days since Lincoln declared all enslaved people free. And the fight goes on, round after round. This past few weeks the bells are ringing more frequently, as more people remember, resist, recognize, and repair.
It’s about time.