"The Truth About Juneteenth..."

What a strange holiday this is... Today we celebrated the anniversary of the last slaves of the confederacy in Galveston, Texas finding out that they'd been lied to by their masters and had been "free" for some weeks before they were finally informed of the fact on June 19th, 1865.

I have very mixed emotions about this holiday... As a blackish* man, throughout my life despite being born nearly 100 years after the "end of slavery" I am constantly reminded that I am not "fully free" and not "fully equal" in the country of my birth simply because of the color of my skin. From the beginnings of slavery and right up until today, America has constantly failed to live up to the ideals of her founding principles. To listen to our "president," you'd think he and those who elected and empower him never heard the lessons I was taught to believe in:

 "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Fact: When those famously eloquent ideals were put to parchment as the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, there were more than 450,000 slaves in the colonies. Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration, himself owned near 600 slaves during his lifetime. Those 450,000 slaves and generations of their progeny created the foundational wealth of what would become the richest and most powerful nation the world has ever known. It all started from their stolen lives and labor. 

Although I live a comfortable life and I have managed to navigate and negotiate a world that's been hostile to people like me, realizing I'm part of the exception for my people and not the rule made it very hard to say, "Happy Juneteenth" and "Happy Emancipation Day" to folks I came across today. I'm not free, and maybe no one is, but I know I'm far less free than my white neighbors next door.

Instead, about today I feel like the central character of Solomon Tauber in the book and film, The Odessa Files, "I bear no hatred nor bitterness... People are not evil. Only individuals are evil." 

I love my country, even if some of my fellow countrymen don't love me.

*Blackish: Black people in America don't look like Africans. We look "Blackish." We are almost all of us are a mixture of African blood and the blood of our one time masters. This is why we come in every shade of the brown spectrum. Our women were frequently taken as enslaved mistresses, but far more commonly they were intentionally raped to create more slaves; slaves with a bond of blood to their masters. 

"Fear Eats the Soul"