Juneteenth Reflections and Culture Shifts: Engaging Campus Community Part I
Since its federal recognition as a holiday, a lot of new attention has been poured towards the abolishment of slavery, communication of this news, and what it means to recognize and address the harms of the past in the present day.
By Justina Thompson — July 5, 2023
As we're just now passing the halfway point in the month of June, Juneteenth is coming up for folks across the country. Since its federal recognition as a holiday, a lot of new attention has been poured towards the abolishment of slavery, communication of this news, and what it means to recognize and address the harms of the past in the present day. For those unaware, Juneteenth is the celebration of the day in 1865 when the news of freedom for enslaved people finally reached Galveston, Texas.
This came over two years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, and while lack of technology for instant communication at the time can be attributed to the news' delivery being delayed, it raises valuable questions like “Freedom for whom?” when discussing these kinds of political declarations. Along with the racial reckoning across the country in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, more attention has been poured towards cross cultural engagement, repairing harm, and uplifting new stories and perspectives on egregious pasts and histories. Even in 2023, I still have a lot of mixed feelings on how conversations have evolved and spun around racial tensions and histories over the past few years, but there are always valuable lessons to harvest and push forward.
Reflections on Past Festivities
June 19th didn't always have this much meaning on a national scale and was occasionally meant as a gathering of remembrance, storytelling, celebration, and visioning for Black communities. To be clear, the history and truth of Juneteenth wasn't something widely known, even among Black students and their adjacent communities. This emphasized the need for community gatherings where this story could be shared, remembered, and honored in a way that inspired forward motion.As a student at a predominately white institute, I thought it was extremely important to bring this history and knowledge to our campus over the summer months. As a junior in school, I planned the first Juneteenth celebration on campus that I knew of, and stove for a balance of education, connection, and celebration of Blackness on campus.
As the main planner, I had extreme support from mentors and campus administrators who helped me secure funding and connections as I sought out a guest speaker, catered food, gathering spaces, and of course a DJ. The final program opened with the a communal singing of the Black National Anthem, 'Lift Every Voice and Sing', followed by a sharing of Juneteenth's history from a professor who also made it his work to prioritize African American history in K-12 learning spaces. In the centering of Black experiences and knowledge, all were invited to to listen and learn, but the intention and focus of the day and event were not lost. This is something important to consider when curating spaces of cultural exchange or connection of your campuses: how can we be intentional about the centering of specific cultural lived experiences, even when the space of connection is open to all?
The program continued into a joyous space with food and music for Black students, faculty, administrators and other staff to meet each other and connect- since a lot of students didn't know where to go for support from someone who may be able to share some similarities of lived experience. While the Black experience is not monolithic, there are some key bonding factors, especially in the greater experience of navigating a predominantly white institute. That connection and bond which began at the celebratory event, was key to building a bond that fostered resilience for Black students and other key members of the campus community. When thinking about that core spirit of community, frequent spaces of joy and connection are key to the strength of these bonds. When pushing for spaces of cross cultural connection and engagement, it is important to also curate insular spaces of cultural connection for that affirmation and reflection of lived experience.
Forward Movement and Intention
While Juneteenth can hold as a grounding point for the Black experience in and around your campus to be centered, it usually also raises questions of how folks from other cultures and background can engage with or learn from the day as well. For that, I want to offer some pillars of white supremacist engagement that we all need to work to unlearn in order to have meaningful and generative engagements across cultures. While it's easy to want to shy away from the conversations or work around white supremacy because of the intensity of the language itself, it's important to realize that this is the base of the society we're navigating today. Unless we're actively working to learn its core and unlearn its behaviors, we will unfortunately replicate it and its harmful impacts, even unintentionally. When having to confront those learned behaviors that create atmospheres for harm and disregard, some of the ideologies that create a barrier are: defensiveness, fear of conflict, individualism, narrow definition of expertise, perceived objectivity, perfectionism, valuing quantity over quality, and urgency. Follow along for some signs to identifies manifestations of these ideologies and how to address them in real time to contribute towards generative engagement.
Urgency
A lot of our society's goals and tasks are structured around harsh time schedules. From meetings set anywhere from 30 minutes to 60 minutes for efficiency or expectations are for graduation to occur within 4 years, deviations outside these timelines are considered failures or disturbances to productivity. With efficiency as the central goal, space for nuance, questions, iterations, collaboration or even multiplicity get lost in the mix in exchange for a crunched timeline. This translates directly to problem-solving as well. When something has been identified as wrong, there's an immediate response to fix it. Minds are jumping to solutions and remedies, whether band-aids or holistic solutions, but with rushing, there is so much that gets missed.
When rushing, there's no guarantee that the whole problem is understood. Potential solutions may only address a branch manifestation of a root cause, and it takes time to go deep and understand conflicts and issues as they arise for their true nature. And as problems usually impact more than one person, group, or community, in order to not cause further issues down the line, it takes time to gather necessary and vast perspectives, for a sustainable solution with wide impact. When things slow down, more people can be brought into the process, there's room for iteration, and thoroughness can thrive. Adrienne Maree Brown gives guidance for collective change building to move at the speed of trust, which means the pace of movements and solutions are based in relationality.
When addressing cross cultural engagements, goals of learning and understanding are often guiding and structuring the spaces. But the constraints of this happening in maybe one or two gatherings puts a pressure and urgency to get to the root and solutions in an unrealistic timeline. In these spaces, what does it look like to slow down, immerse in the process and remove time as any measure of success? What might it look like to build towards spaces of continuity and frequent connections instead of rushed achievements?
Justina Thompson
Justina "Farmer J" Thompson is the Farm Education and Volunteer Manager at Urban Creators, Philadelphia, PA. Justina intentionally attended school in Philadelphia so she could “connect her passion and experience to the ongoing environmental justice work in the area.” As a speaker, educational curriculum designer, program leader, and community organizer, Justina possesses extensive knowledge on urban farming inspired to work in the field of environmental justice from a young age.
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