This is Juneteenth weekend, which, I think, is the right occasion for the deepest claim in this arc of posts about freedom.
Before I start, I want to acknowledge that I am not a minority of any type. I have also been blessed in many ways in my life, so I would also have to acknowledge that I would probably be considered entitled. My point is that I have not experienced personally the struggles that many minorities go through.
But I would also postulate that you don’t have to have been a victim to know right from wrong. Especially for something as egregious as this wound our nation has been struggling to heal not for just 250 years, but for over 500 years now, since the first Europeans came to the New World. Truthfully, even longer – as long as one man has refused to acknowledge the worth of another to make their own choices.
In June 1865, Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, and read aloud General Order No. 3: all slaves are free. The law behind the order was two and a half years old. The Emancipation Proclamation had been signed January 1, 1863. The Civil War was effectively over. The enslaved people who heard the announcement in Galveston had been legally free for thirty months. They had not been free to act on it. Many didn’t even know about it.
Their enslavers had known. Some had moved to Texas specifically because the Union Army was slower to arrive there to enforce the proclamation, hoping to squeeze a few more years of forced labor out of people whose freedom was, on paper, already accomplished. There was no confusion about what the law required. Instead, they continued to commit a crime.
I want to be precise about what the crime was. Slavery is not, in the deepest sense, about owning. Owning is a crime, but it is the mechanism.
The more heinous crime underneath the mechanism is the decision — by one person, about another — that the other is not entitled to choose what they will be. That decision is the original violation. Everything that follows from it, the chains and the labor and the family separation and the violence, is the maintenance of that first act.
The two-and-a-half-year delay between the Proclamation and Juneteenth was not a separate offense. It was the same offense, extended. The enslavers who chose to defy the law were making the same decision they had made every day before: that the people in their power were not entitled to decide what to do with their lives.
This is the framework I am writing the saga inside (and there are spoilers ahead). The Church decides that ordinary people aren’t entitled to understand what’s coming. The Garden makes the same decision about its petals — they don’t get to choose their own lives. And as far as the aliens are concerned, they make it simple: humanity is not entitled to exist on its own terms. Only on theirs.
Each of these is the same act in a different costume. Each is a violation of something I take to be axiomatic: that no person, ever, is entitled to make that decision about another person.
Juneteenth isn’t just a holiday. It is an annual reminder that the original violation has been with us a long time, and that we are not done yet with what it demands from us.
What we are called to do, as Americans, and even more so if you believe in a Light above us all, is to never stop choosing to try to be better than those who came before us. Never give up, even when things seem dark. Choose every day to put your principles into action, to treat others the way you want to be treated, and refuse to choose what others are allowed to be.