My Ancestors Were Enslavers: What Juneteenth Means to Me
The Civil War. Freed slaves (‘contrabands’) at Cumberland Landing, Va. Washington, DC. 1862
June 19th, known as Juneteenth, is commonly celebrated among African Americans as the day their freedom from slavery was finally enforced, as news of the Emancipation Proclamation was announced in Galveston, Texas, at the close of the Civil War in 1865.
Insights into the power and pain surrounding Juneteenth have been offered by Jarvis R. Givens, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education. He speaks of Juneteenth as a day that “commemorates the suffering and deliverance of Black people. It wasn't only about them being enslaved, but also a protracted struggle to make freedom a real thing.”
That struggle continues today. Many Black people are still fighting for freedom by escaping the “generational deprivation” they experience in substandard schools, inadequate housing, police violence, mass incarceration, healthcare inequities, unemployment, discrimination at work, voter suppression, the mutations of White supremacy, and the wealth gap.
Juneteenth for This White Guy
For me, Juneteenth is a day of personal reckoning. I’m a White American man descended from enslavers in Virginia. My ancestors degraded and oppressed hundreds of women and men of African descent.
I’ve given more than fifty years of my life to fighting for diversity, equity, and inclusion. On Juneteenth, I seek to better understand the suffering that my ancestors unleashed in history, so I can be part of healing the pain that persists today. The point is not to wallow in guilt; the point is to own my story, so I can be honest about the many advantages in my life.
When I was 13, a month after Dr. King was killed in 1968, my parents took me to a racial reconciliation workshop in Seattle. The pastor, Reverend Woodie White, a Black man, looked at me and said: “I need you to take responsibility for being White, so you become part of the solution and not part of my problem.” His words turned into an unexpected vocational calling, and I’ve devoted the years since to my own learning, so that I can build bridges with people experiencing disadvantage, and equip people in the cultures that also shape me.
Every year on Juneteenth I consider how privilege operates in my life. contemplate how to respond to a startling accountability statement from Jesus: “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded.” It’s an invitation for me to own a much older part of my story, that goes like this:
I am a deeply advantaged White American man, thirteen generations down the family tree from upper-crust English men and women who enslaved people from Africa, as well as confined and oppressed Indigenous people. The William Byrds I, II, and III, my ancestors, established the Westover Plantation (now 1,025 acres) in Charles City County, Virginia. Starting in 1676, they enslaved at least hundreds of people on their tobacco farm, which eventually grew to 179,000 acres.
I am not my ancestors. I am the son of two very intentional Christians, Beck and Mary Shelton.
And I come from generations in which privilege has literally taken deep root, manifesting in the indignity and violence that does not happen to us, in our natural expectations for education and opportunity, and in the experience of convenience, and abundance, and self-actualization.
Racial Reckoning is a Call to Action
For Me
This accountability around race requires disorienting emotional work. It requires me to acknowledge and accept the guilt and shame I feel for what “my people” did. It’s become a time to tell my story openly, to invite other white people to lean into their own stories, in which racial advantage figures. Juneteenth is a time for me to channel these emotions and apply my learning, so that I find more courage for the “good trouble” ahead. The day invites me to a new
form of freedom.
Even for the Families Who Now Own the Westover Plantation (not my relatives)
I was heartened to find this on the Westover Plantation’s website: “The Fisher and Erda families unequivocally believe that black lives matter…. We recognize that for many people, particularly African Americans and Native Americans, places such as Westover serve as reminders of a far grimmer and horrific past, and that peace and respite are quite opposite to what they feel here. History cannot be undone, but we hope that in its truthful telling, there are opportunities for reconciliation and healing for people of all skin colors.” Even White people who own plantations in this century are looking ahead by reckoning with the past.
For Your Organization
Perhaps your organization is considering how to honor the invitation inherent in Juneteenth. I recommend four actions, perhaps as an agenda for 2022:
Make Juneteenth a paid day off for mutual reflection and community service. Then center the learning and service on improving the lives of people struggling with systemic racism.
Build an anti-racist curriculum for Juneteenth learning, that helps each colleague own their story, hear others’ stories, and construct a new and more equitable story together.
Organize rolling days of service, so every person in the company acts directly to fight bias or generate opportunity in their local community.
Apply what people learn around Juneteenth to relentlessly identify and remove bias from talent decisions (in hiring, performance appraisal, promotions) and customer connections.
Truth Be Told
Part of me regrets the need to write this article; it’s embarrassing, it makes me publicly vulnerable, it puts my “woke” reputation at risk. Yet the celebration of freedom in Juneteenth means that I am free to shine a light into the long shadows that my ancestors cast. I am free to own my story and share it, so that other White folks will stop deflecting the responsibility we bear for playing our part in ending racism. I want my children and grandchildren—however they identify racially—to be freer than I feel, because I have helped them escape the racist shadows of our ancestors.
Juneteenth is calling to you, my White kindred. It’s the voice of freedom.