Juneteenth
It was James Baldwin I first heard say the American dream was essentially the Black American’s nightmare. And so it is with June 19th/Juneteenth. Having been emancipated from enslavement over two years prior, many Black Americans in Texas were only told of this fact on June 19th 1865. And even then, the system which America and it’s economic engine of consumer capitalism is founded on - genocide, land theft and chattel slavery… and with it, stolen labor - had been put in motion.
I think about the Buddha and the caste system he came up in, 2700 or so years ago, and how I imagine its roots are similar and yet not the same. Rooted in clinging/greed/consumption, hatred/aversion, and ignorance/indifference, delusion, these three poisons are habits of mind found in both systems, creating artificial separation that lies at the root of the affliction of separation/delusional superiority, loneliness, rage and shame that poison us all.
These habits of mind and heart of course can be cultivated either way: the old story of the child asking the grandfather, when seeing two wolves, one “good” and one “bad, asks - which one grows bigger? To which the wise man responds, “the one you feed.” What are we feeding?
The ways in which colonialism and institutional racism infect our human hearts, minds, and bodies, has permeated every aspect of us - its entirely insidious, as is all conditioning (karmically, everything is subject to causes and conditions, and therefore it’s unsurprising that if for centuries one system has oppressed certain groups of people, that it will take time to imagine, create and implement a new system based on common dignity and humanity). As the creator of the 1619 Project Nikole Hannah-Jones had said at the start of the pandemic, that many of us were indeed in the same water, but some were swimming downstream, and others upstream.
And yet, if we carry our mindfulness practice forward and we, as is often recommended in the mental noting practice (seeing, seeing… hearing, hearing… not getting caught up in the story but in the experience of our faculties) we may do so with institutional oppression and racism: we can “name it to tame it.” Given these systems of oppression, if we are not in a subjugated racialized position, our often startling, horrific recognition of this country’s true genesis (for of course the USA/North America existed as an interdependent land, with its Indigenous first nations peoples, as Turtle Island, prior to settler colonialism) can put us into a shame spiral. Instead, we can cultivate a courageous heart, shift from shame to engaged humility, equitable empowerment… inviting in an elegant ferocity, and stare clearly and cleanly into the truth of suffering, as the Buddha invited us to do: and then recognize our personal and collective paths to transformation.
I didn’t know much of anything, if at all, about Juneteenth before I started looking. I hesitated to write anything at all. As what I like to now say was a white-adjacent upbringing, as a Haitian-Dominican Italian-American raised by a white Italian family in a white school in a white suburb in Massachusetts, my lived experience was not particularly racialized until I went to college, where despite it’s international student contingent, I was asked to categorize myself by checking off boxes: Other, Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, etc…. I checked many. My lived experience there became segregated based on those boxes also. I lived as a white-adjacent cishet (cisgendered, heterosexual) woman, enduring many micro aggressions regarding my exotic looks, or fetishization around my womanness, but I did not have an experience of being a Black American in this country I could see other than dealing with my hair and my hips (not in fashion at that time). While I studied Sojurner Truth, read Richard Wright and Ray Bradbury and Toni Morrison, I never “got” the racialized trauma that is inherent to the founding of this country (as Apartheid is/was to South Africa, also, for example) at a visceral level, either due to light skin privilege and/or my proximity to my white family, and/or their economic stability, or my own entitlement, ignorance and not wanting to see.
All that is to say is that I’m still new to this work. My mentor Dr. Jack Kornfield invited me into studying antiracism work a few years ago as part of my spiritual practice and mindfulness training, because he suggested I was in a unique position to do so as a multiethnic, biracial person. I never imagined what I’d uncover: learning the last lynching in the US was in the 1980’s while I was alive, discovering that it was against the law for a Black person to testify in a court of law against someone white, how modern policing is a vestige of slave patrols, or even understanding the origins of the delusion of white superiority by studying pseudoscientists like Carl Linnaeus who categorized groups of people based on random assignations (or as the Buddha might say, perceptions) and valued some over others: white skin on top, everyone else, in a hierarchy of subjugation and exploitation.
To see Juneteenth as a celebration of the resilience, joy, and struggle of Black Americans is to see that the perseverance of the sanctity of life is deeply grounded and rooted in an inner knowing and collective holding. Despite having been called 3/5 of a person, your children and families in perpetual enslavement for centuries, your daughters raped regularly and their children taken as property, and all the Jim Crow laws and redlining that followed - perpetuating a system of have and have nots, including the destruction of intergenerational wealth among Black Americans with massacres in Tusla and Rosewood, medical experiments like Tuskeegee and the OBGYN horrors perpetuated by J. Marion Sims and more, the repairs to the ruptures owed to Black Americans (and Indigenous folx as well as other subjugated and exploited communities) is enormous. And yet we have yet to name the truth of our founding.
Juneteehth precedes Independence Day, the 4th of July, by nary a fortnight. And yet the two dates describe a tale of two Americas so rooted in the delusion of superiority that the celebration of Black American freedom and resilience is not a national holiday in the same way the 4th is. In my view, it should be. It would be one small step towards the likes of a “Sorry Day” commemorated in Australia. Of a naming of the hard truths of where we’ve come from, so we may know where we are, and how we may imagine anew.
Nondualism and the truths of “not two” describe our relative and our ultimate selves - both/and: that we are process to begin with, all energy on a continuum. And, that we are incarnate, here for a time on this earth in this body and skin, and that from whence we came, we shall also go - part of the mystery of our “part” of showing up in the continuum. Yes, there is oneness, but as my mentor likes to say, which I believe his teacher Ram Dass used to say, don’t forget your social security number. Which means to me, in this case, don’t spiritually bypass around issues of racism (or anything for that matter, including troubling truths like incest and abuse). Ground ourselves in our innate goodness, capacity for joy, recognition of our common humanity, and lean into mindfully discovering that which is challenging, right here and right now. In my direct experience, the way out is through, whether it’s my personal traumas or the grand trauma of settler colonialism and racism rooted in the chattel slavery whose abolition is celebrated on June 19th/Juneteenth.
This invitation is one to reckon with ourselves, with our histories, and with all of our imprinting - and from this place of relaxed and alert, noble and dignified, I’m enough and I matter, to lean into holding both truths: if I’m in a white or light skinned body, I inherit privileges with this based on the oppression of others, which is based on a lie. And if I’m in a Black or brown body, I too may have internalized oppression that is my birthright to be liberated from. We need all hands on deck. And it’s for those who created or inherited these delusional privileges to lean in, to help restore our collective equanimity using our compassion, intelligence, hearts, and to do it not out of guilt but love.
To me, nirvana is not somewhere “out there.” It’s right here for us: it’s our ability to respond appropriately to what’s here right now. And right here, right now, we experience the pain of racism. Juneteenth celebrates the reclamation of humanity, and is an invitation for us to bow to one another with grace, inviting in a humility and putting in skillful means to continue to work towards sustainable policy changes, creative liberatory strategies, and deep spiritual practice.
May all beings be safe, happy, healthy and free from harm, and may we see one another through the eyes of our cosmic intelligence, experiencing from the inside out our deepest connection. May we act with love, from this connected place, to create change.
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