THE SHAPE OF JUNETEENTH

WRITTEN BY MAYA LAFLAMME, GSA NETWORK CO-EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Mary Hooks, a teacher and a friend, says the mandate for Black people in this time is to avenge the suffering of our ancestors, earn the respect of future generations, and be willing to be transformed in the service of the work.

For Black TQ2S+ kin, that mandate is doubly true, because we have been lied to twice over. Lied to about our freedom, and lied to about ourselves. So when I hear Mary Hooks, I hear that avenging our ancestors means making sure the lie never takes hold again. Earning the respect of future generations means doing our work with dignity and care, for our babies and for the earth. And being willing to be transformed in service of the work means allowing yourself to know your soul self, which is exactly what the lies were built to bury.

Young TQ2S+ people are closer to the remembering. The longer we travel through these structures, the heavier the curtain of forgetting becomes. But queerness, transness, is itself an act of remembering, a refusal of the curtain. Young queer and trans people are still near the truth of who we are, and they can unearth the lies quicker because they use the same muscle for the very same work. That is why they lead us, not despite their youth but because of it.

Because a truth about Juneteenth is that enslavement did not end that day. Freedom was not granted that day. June 19th is the day the Confederate army stopped putting military power behind the system of slavery, the day the machinery of the lie broke down and the truth our people always carried stood in the open.  We know they transformed the system of slavery into prisons, into schools, into the workplace and still the truth keeps surfacing. 

So we do not celebrate being freed, we celebrate freedom as innate, and we celebrate the proof that no lie, however armed, however convoluted, can hold forever. That is what Juneteenth is; point of clarity. A day that reminds us the truth can always be unearthed, and that we are the ones who unearth it.

Once you know to look, you can see the shape of Juneteenth everywhere. I see it in the eyes of the girls teaching and caring for each other in ROSES. I see it in Black young people speaking life into each other, loving each other in TRUTH. I see it in the tightly coiled hair of my child. I see it in the smile creases of my Black lesbian elders at the Pride marches. 

That is why we do not celebrate America; instead, we celebrate ourselves and each other. We gather collective strength through play and dance and grieving and feeding each other, because the work of remembering continues. So when we say Happy Juneteenth we mean that I relish in the manifestation of you today, and all of our people who sit inside you. That I am delighted by the truth that they will never win and we are destined to.