On Juneteenth

by Annette Gordon-Reed

As painful as it may be, recognizing—though not dwelling on—tragedy and the role it plays in our individual lives, and in the life of a state or nation, is, I think, a sign of maturity.

I believe the Nobel laureate was wrong about that. The past is dead. But, like other formerly living things, echoes of the past remain, leaving their traces in the people and events of the present and future.

For many years, Blacks like the ones in Conroe and Livingston—all over the country, really—have had their stories written out of history. The tyranny of ideas about “the archive,” or what constitutes the official record, all too often, has buried their knowledge and rendered it suspect.

The law might say I could go to a school or into a store. But it could not ensure that I would be welcome when I came to these places.

I can’t say it was the case with all Black teachers of my mother’s generation, who had come of age in the South, as she did, but I know from her life and from the way her colleagues responded to me, that many of them saw themselves as on a mission. Education was about the individual students, just as it was for my teachers at Anderson, but there was an additional component; an explicit mission of race uplift. My teachers at Anderson did not have to concern themselves with that.

Origin stories matter, for individuals, groups of people, and for nations. They inform our sense of self; telling us what kind of people we believe we are, what kind of nation we believe we live in. They usually carry, at least, a hope that where we started might hold the key to where we are in the present.

History is about people and events in a particular setting and context, and how those things have changed over time in ways that make the past different from our own time, with an understanding that those changes were not inevitable.

Despite that reassessment, two centuries of telling the Pilgrims’ story in the traditional way continues to shape attitudes about the beginnings of what would become our country.

All of this was the result of a nationalist-oriented history, with an intense focus on what was going on within the boundaries of the United States, and seeing what was going on almost totally from the perspective of English-speaking (and White) people.

it helped create and maintain an extremely narrow construction of Blackness.

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; like the inanity that children produced from the union of a Black person and a White person were sterile, like a mule, in either the first or a later generation.

but seeing Africans in America who were out of the strict confines of the plantation—and seeing them presented as something other than the metaphorical creation of English people—would have pushed back against the narrative of inherent limitation.

For all its problems, nationalist-oriented history presented a cogent telling of the origins of the United States, though a superficial

There is no reason for the people taken from Africa to define themselves strictly by the categories their captors created.

The English were relative newcomers to the practice. The field of Atlantic history, which studies the era of contact between Africans, Europeans, and Indigenous people in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, began to take hold in the 1980s, when I was in college and in law school.

The six flags refer to the six flags of the countries that flew over Texas in history: Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the United States, and the Confederate States of America.

This displays very well the contingent nature of history, and how difficult it can be, when considering the history of a given time and place, to keep in mind that our view is colored by the knowledge of how things turned out.

My father insisted that this policing went on, that my White friends could know the right thing to do—even want to do it—but could not bring themselves to do it because they feared losing the love, esteem, and support of their community. It was never just a matter of individual feelings or weaknesses. My father did not use the term, but he was suggesting the problem was structural.

But one thing that has changed greatly in Texas from my childhood up until now is the determination to bring people of color into the Texas narrative as much as possible. That is all to the good, and a thing that can be done as a matter of course in researching and writing history.

One of the tests of a great song or poem—any work of art, really—is its capacity to touch different people in different ways across time.

About the difficulties of Texas: Love does not require taking an uncritical stance toward the object of one’s affections. In truth, it often requires the opposite. We can’t be of real service to the hopes we have for places—and people, ourselves included—without a clear-eyed assessment of their (and our) strengths and weaknesses. That often demands a willingness to be critical, sometimes deeply so. How that is done matters, of course. Striking the right balance can be exceedingly hard.