What About June 20?

Very early in the pandemic, problematic comparisons to freedom were being made.

“Ahh — this quarantine feels like prison!”

For many Americans, having the freedom to walk about one’s living quarters dampened the hyperbolic parallel drawn to those in true confinement.

Yet another comparison struck me during a growing national awareness of Juneteenth in 2020.

“Man, I feel like a slave.”

At that point, many of us had been in the house for 3 months. The agony bellowed by so many who had the ability to control their heat, AC, food intake, and leisurely activity stood in contrast to those who were forced to work outside from “see” to “can’t see”.

Indeed, the 30 months between when the Emancipation Proclamation was ratified and when a group of enslaved peoples in the lone star state were made aware of this emancipation was spent with those Texans toiling under the visibility of the lone star. Daily.

For 901 days, these Black people were subjugated to all of the elements of enslavement, including brutal hours, unconscionable treatment, and paltry housing conditions. Between 1863 and 1865, some human traffickers even forcibly moved these Black people to Texas to evade emancipation. And all this under the heat of the blazing star in the sky that brought with it a fresh hope every rising.

While the feverish Googling of Juneteenth in 2021 lets me know that I don’t have to spend much time detailing what occurred on the mid-June occasion in 1865, I am much more curious about what happened in the days following the enforcement of the proclamation.

In particular, I wonder about June 20.

The Psychology of Freedom

As a Black psychologist, I can’t help but to think about what our formerly enslaved ancestors were experiencing. I also wonder about what their former captors felt. And then I think about the tension between that space.

…to the formerly enslaved:

Imagine waking up on June 20, 1865 — a day like any other — except it is not. It is the first day that you have learned that you are not under the iron thumb of a fellow human being. What do you first smell? What do you do with your newfound time? What do you plan for the day?

For many formerly enslaved Black Americans, those questions were likely coming in the midst of figuring out where to live, how to make a way for their family, and pinching themselves to see if this proclamation heard yesterday is actually true and will persist from day to day.

And — in the stillness of a brief moment between these thoughts — our ancestors may have asked an important question: why did it take so long for me to find out about my freedom?

This is the question that keeps me up at night during this pseudo-joyous time of declaring Juneteenth a national holiday. It is important to explore the immediate feeling of betrayal in the midst of emancipation efforts, as our ancestors sought an explanation for the 901 days spent in bondage after the original proclamation.

What anger. What sadness. What imagining for what would have been. Had that one ancestor not been worked so hard that they died in the middle of the field. That the trade made just a few short months ago hadn’t resulted in the selling of a youngest child to another slave-holding family. That the callouses on their hands may have disappeared during those 2 1/2 years.

How did our ancestors look upon those who enslaved them? Did they greet the person responsible for such trauma, death, separation, malnutrition, and dehumanization? Did they spit at them and risk certain punishment? Did they cry in anguish for the 30 months PLUS countless prior spent in squalor?

How do I co-exist with my captors?

…to the captors:

On June 20, 1865, this was also a morning like no other for former human traffickers. Did they feel shame at dragging dismembered families to Texas to avoid the proclamation ratified in 1863? Could they look at the faces of the people who they bought, sold, whipped, forcibly assaulted, and demeaned as anything remotely close to fully human? As a neighbor? As a people deserving of equal rights AND recompense — both fiscally and psychologically — for maltreatment by their hands?

Slave owners had believed their rhetoric so firmly that this 24-hour period between Juneteenth and June 20 relative to the 21,624 hours post Emancipation Proclamation and 2,067,360 post 1619 port docking could not have shifted their firm beliefs about who these people were to them. Indeed, slave holders in Delaware and Kentucky still did not liberate enslaved Black people by Juneteenth, taking yet another 6 months to act out on this proclamation. These captors maintained these beliefs through the resuscitation of slave patrols and creation of the KKK while they were being asked to live in community with Black Americans post Civil War.

In the coming days, weeks, months, years, decades, and even centuries, descendants of those slave holders would not apologize, nor repay, nor acknowledge such harm. Modern descendants, in fact, are so offended by the notion that time has not healed all racial wounds that they would rather ban criticism of race in schools than acknowledge the real history of this barbaric country.

…and to the space in between:

Which brings us to the tension that no doubt emanated between parties on June 20. If no repair was actively being made to rectify the psychological rift between oppressors and targets on that new morning, what was to come of a nation that was attempting to unify fractured nations through reconstruction? Arguably the decade that followed this morning saw with it great strides in political reconstruction, but what was it like to share space and place between groups with such an unequal power dynamic and centuries-long history of mutilation and humiliation? How could trust ever be established in a time period so close to when just one short morning ago, our ancestors could not fathom such freedom? And, most important for healing, how could we assure that such repair was consistent, irreversible, and genuine?

— — —

These questions and tensions are still evident as we begin to celebrate Juneteenth as a national holiday. In 2021, after 15 months of quarantine — still, only half the time our enslaved ancestors remained in bondage post the proclamation — people are ready to turn a new page, to gather, to celebrate being amongst each other.

And yet, will we pause today to assess what it will take for this holiday not to be just symbolic, but to imagine what the experience was for those who had to live through this day and beyond in Galveston, Texas? To truly strive towards recompense rather than recognition? And certainly to understand how this day was just one of the thousands that begs fraught questions of the lived experience of Black peoples in the United States?

It is what we do on June 20 that will shift our country from acknowledgment of Black oppression to action for Black equity. We must invest in healing practices, open communication about race, and cooperative spaces which allow us the freedom we so desperately seek. Let us not wait another day to advance the psychological freedom for Black Americans experiencing the living memory of racial trauma today.