On Juneteenth

by Annette Gordon-Reed

Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” What that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man is part of what I hope to explore in the essays of this book.

But the power of habit, bolstered by a silent undercurrent of intimidation and fear, was strong.

As the years passed, there were other, less intense, moments like that. People I didn’t know wanted to fight me or threatened to beat me up. If a cartoonist were to draw pictures of these encounters, the expression on my face would be a combination of fear and utter confusion. The thought bubble would say, “Who are you?” I understand now in a way that I did not then, that the “you” in that question was a person who felt a sense of deep loss. I was seen, wrongly, as the catalyst for that loss.

Both memory and mythology have their uses, even if they must be separated from our understandings about the demands of historical thinking.

So much of racism is about announcing, in various ways, the agreed-upon fictions about Black people that justify attempting to keep them in a subordinate status;

The idea of violence as a solution to a problem has plagued humankind from the beginning.