Know Thyself -- Juneteenth and the Struggle for Justice

I come from Field Negro stock. This means that my parents were survivors of segregation and descendants of African slaves who were kidnapped from Africa and forced to work in the fields as sources of free labor. Field work was the most brutal. Frederick Douglass gives a detailed description of the differences between slaves who worked in the Big House and those who worked in the fields in his slave narrative, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. In either case, there was no guarantee of justice. A slave could be killed or maimed without provocation or redress. This type of beastliness extended itself to segregation, although, news of a particularly fiendish murder could be reported in the black newspapers with a demand for an investigation. The results were almost always the same -- impunity.

Today, so little African-American history is taught that such claims would seem ridiculous or, at best, told as if the occurrences were rare when in fact they were probably as frequent as gang violence is today. Certainly, this is an ironic analogy, since for hundreds of years, whites killed us or forced other blacks to do the job for them. Now, we blacks kill one another voluntarily and whites wonder why we do it.

Being the daughter of parents who grew up picking cotton in the fields, I am the recipient of many legacies of slavery, one of which is having things taken from me, specifically, things that I had worked for. My mother had no problem taking my money and material possessions and giving them to family members who she thought needed them more. After all, so many things had been taken from her and she felt her cause was worthy. Unfortunately, this taught me that other people were more worthy than I and it has subsequently caused a great deal of conflict within the family.

After my siblings and I grew up, my mother began counseling and made it her mission in life to bring us all into counseling in order to heal the family. We're still working on this. However, concerning my own issues from a lack of self-worth, I first had to learn that this belief in my lack of worth was why I made certain decisions in my life. Being described as lazy, fearful, unmotivated, etc. has been an injustice to the quality of my life as measured by the source -- lack of self-worth, taught to me by my mother, who inherited this belief from slavery.

Thanks to my mother's efforts to bring the family closer together through counseling and my knowledge of black history, my mother and I are making great strides at healing and redemption. Unfortunately for the United States as a whole, there can be no redemption, no justice, as long as it denies and dismisses its responsibility for what happened to African-Americans during slavery.