What Juneteenth Actually Means — Liberation, the Body, and Who Gets to Tell the Story

On June 19th 1865 Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas and told Black people what had already been true for two and a half years. That they were free. The delay was not accidental. Freedom had been the law of the land and the people it applied to were kept in bondage through deliberate deception.This episode is sacred and it is political and it is personal. I'm sharing a story about a friendship that ended, about what happens when Black women educate white people about their own history and watch that knowledge get worn like a costume in white rooms with no attribution and no acknowledgment of where it came from. I'm giving you the full history of Juneteenth because it belongs to us and we deserve to know it completely. And I'm talking about what liberation actually feels like in the nervous system of a body that has been conditioned for generations to brace.We close with an ancestral ritual to honor the ones who chose the water instead of bondage. The ones who did not survive to see June 19th but whose radical self determination made every freedom that came after possible.This one is for us.Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson. Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co