As we near the holiday of Juneteenth, I decided to write something. I don’t consider myself a writer, but I do like to write. I used to write a lot when I was younger, and have recently found a reason to start again, and am enjoying it. However, writing is difficult. It’s difficult because it opens up vulnerability and just the nature of putting pen to paper or in today’s world, keyboard to Word, opens up that vulnerability virtually forever. Many of the things I write about are drawn from my experience in life. And that experience, being that of an Afro-American, makes it almost impossible to avoid talking about race. Contrary to popular opinion, we actually don’t like talking about race. It’s just that, at least in this country, so many things come back to it.
So, for this Juneteenth, as I looked for inspiration, I purposefully looked for something positive. Do you know how difficult it is to write something about Juneteenth and make it positive? Don’t worry, I’ll wait.
I tried a few angles. Black inventors. I thought about a talk I recently attended by Isabel Wilkerson. The Great Migration. The brilliance Black people carried with them when they finally moved north, west, all the way up here to the Pacific Northwest. She wrote a whole book about it, The Warmth of Other Suns, documenting six million people who packed up everything and chased freedom that had been announced but not yet delivered. Some of them kept going until they hit the water. Some of them ended up here.
But then I’d follow the thread and find the same thing waiting at the end of it. Redlining. Discriminatory hiring. The same systems in new geography.
Because here’s what Juneteenth truly commemorates. Not freedom. The distance between freedom declared and freedom delivered. June 19, 1865. The day Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas to announce that enslaved people were free. The Emancipation Proclamation had been signed two and a half years earlier. Two and a half years of continued bondage after legal freedom had been declared. The people with power withheld the information because it served them to do so.
I see that same dynamic play out in real time. Whenever I sit down with other Afro-Americans, we share a lot. History, current events, what we experience and what’s happening out there. And the information is often negative. Because the news almost always is. And us as a people in those spaces are absorbing it, every story, every rollback, every headline. Add that to everything else they’re already carrying. That’s not just exhausting. Research is clear that chronic stress kills. It raises blood pressure, disrupts sleep, accelerates disease. For Black Americans in particular, the weight of the world is a health crisis dressed up as staying informed.
So, I’ve been thinking about what it means to be free. Not legally free but actually freedom over your complete self, both mentally and physically. But not only that, if we are truly free, how we express that in our day-to-day lives.
Every cookout. Every belly laugh. Every time a person loves out loud, builds something with their hands, takes a walk in the woods just because it feels good, puts the phone down and sits in the sun, that’s defiance. Not the dramatic kind. The everyday kind. The kind that says I know exactly what this world has done and continues to do, and I refuse to let it take my joy too.
Recently a close friend and I were doing what we do, sitting down, solving the problems of the world. And we discussed the subject of sovereignty. Not political sovereignty. Personal sovereignty. Ownership of your complete health and well-being. And we landed on something that felt true: living your life fully, on your own terms, is the purest form of freedom there is. The lack of systems of control of your health, wealth, love and mobility. And in a country with a long history of deciding what Black people deserve, what we can have, where we can live, what we can know about our own bodies, living that way is also the purest form of defiance.
So, this month, as we celebrate Juneteenth, as well as pride, that’s my wish for you. Defy the odds. Defy the systems. Love who you love. Be in the spaces you want to be in. Not by fighting, but by living. Follow your heart. Go against the grain. Be exactly who you are, no matter who it offends or what systems it doesn’t fit into. Take up space. Rest without guilt. Love loudly. Heal on your own terms.
That is freedom. And nobody can announce it for you or withhold it for two and a half years. It’s already yours, so own it.