Happy Juneteenth!

[sonia]

I saw a tweet that said "Juneteenth is a leisure day for Black folks. A reparations day for all others. Spread the word." by TheNapMinistry.

Yesterday I donated all the client payments I took in (coincidentally from BIPOC) to the Black Resilience Fund.

From sheafrotherdon Resources and giving opportunities for Juneteenth and also from celli Resources compiled from a twitter query.

What really happened on Juneteenth — and why it’s time for supremacists and their sympathizers to surrender by Robin Washington.

“We knowed what was goin’ on in [the war] all the time,” Felix Haywood, who was enslaved in Texas, is recorded as saying in an account by historian Gregory P. Downs.

Haywood was in no way an anomaly, but representative of the majority of the enslaved populace, Downs asserts. He further quotes Haywood saying, “We all felt like heroes and nobody had made us that way but ourselves.”

If Galveston’s Blacks already knew they were free, obviously so too did their slaveholders, who nonetheless kept them in bondage — not by cunning or deceit or ignorance, but by the brute force and tactics of dehumanizing torture they had been using for 200 years.

I'm leaving in what I posted earlier as an example of the myth that we usually hear.

Black Resilience Fund (mythical) info on Juneteenth:

On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all enslaved peoples. It wasn't until June 19, 1865—two and and a half years later—enslaved people in Galveston, Texas learned they had been freed. There weren't many union soldiers in the State of Texas during the Civil War to echo President Lincoln's proclamation. It wasn't until Union Major General Gordon Granger landed on Galveston Island in 1865 to enforce the executive order stating all enslaved people were granted their full liberty and personhood that enslaved Texans were made aware of their freedom.

We acknowledge that the structural inequities of our community and country are rooted in the original enslavement of Black people. We also acknowledge that all freed Black people were promised 40 acres and a mule, but most never received these reparations. This is one of the many promises made to Black people that were broken.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

Robin Washington's article is eye-opening, amazing, and yes, enraging. I'm so grateful to him for writing it and to you for these links.

[sonia]

Yeah, definitely all of those things! I imagine I understand how much everything is warped through the lens of white supremacy, and then I get shown yet another twist, like this one.

Carolyn posted the link as a comment on this Whatever post. (I'm not recommending all the comments, though.)

[minoanmiss]

ahahahaha Scalzi always throws an entertaining online party. There is one spectacularly clueless/probably troll comment, a Technically Right comment, and some actual beginnings of thoughts, so far.