On Juneteenth

by Annette Gordon-Reed

I could believe that Indians and African Americans and, actually different Indians among themselves, should have recognized that they faced a common foe. But that is because I had imbibed the racial thinking of my times, which had largely been imposed by Europeans—creating people called “white” and categories of people who were “nonwhite” for purposes of deciding what rights people had and how they could be treated or mistreated. As a measure of self-defense, African Americans went with that program, and forged ties based on race, making a positive out of what had been created as a negative. All of that was in the big picture of the Parker narrative, a story of encroachment, met by defense and retaliation. Actually, that story was bigger and older than Whites versus Indians. The Comanches themselves were not indigenous to Texas, having come to the area from more northern regions of what we know as the United States, displacing, most often with violence, other native groups as they went. Over time, they created what has been called an “empire,” the Comancheria, that extended through parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas, and into northern Mexico. The picture was, indeed, bigger and more complicated than I imagined during my childhood.