How Deep Is Americas Reckoning with Racism?
In the early 2000s, before the levees broke in New Orleans, it was still possible to be a provincial New Englander and drive in a shiny rental car down Interstate 45 toward Galveston, Texas, without feeling anything except a profound appreciation for the beauty glistening off the West Bay in the sun. Galveston is one of those seaports that can make you stop in your tracks as you consume its beauty, even as Barack Obamas 2008 election brought long simmering white resentment to a boil beneath flapping DONT TREAD ON ME banners and Confederate-flagstamped golf carts in the West End. The smell of the ocean can almost make you forget that Texas, the vast landscape to which Galveston attaches, is a place where you had the best homemade tamales from a pregnant Mexican woman outside of Marfa mere days after you were called the N-word for only the second time in your life. The woman who said it, smiling and blonde, did so in the middle of a fancy restaurant near the University of Texas at Austin campus, as a white couple, friends of your ex-husband, pretended that they didnt hear. As an elitist Masshole, you find it easy to fall back on tired stereotypes when you think about this Texas that you tried so hard to love, a muggy place peopled by caricatures of tobacco-chewing, bigoted white men and bearded libertarian food truck proprietors. How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith Buy on Bookshop  And then you realize that the thing everyone says about Texasthat it is the most racist place in the countryis also what people say about any place in America where the anti-Blackness is less familiar to them than the white supremacy that they are used to. You also remember the older relative who laughed when you said such and such a place was the most racistthats like saying one body of water is wetter than another, they scoffed, and then fighting over who is right. And you think how easy it is to be so shallow about an American story that has so much depth. On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed Buy on Bookshop  Galveston might be part of Texas, a state that self-righteous Northern liberals would find easy enough to mock even if Ted Cruz didnt exist, but it is also the birthplace of Juneteenth, the African American holiday more enduring than the free Black celebrations of West Indian emancipation that preceded it. Once the capital of the Republic of Texas, Galveston was home to nearly 2,000 enslaved people in 1860, although hundreds more newly freed people migrated to the city in the years after the Civil War. Like many remote areas of the Confederacy, Texas was slow to respond to the wars endthe Army of the Trans-Mississippi did not officially surrender until June 2, and it wasnt until over two weeks later, on June 19, 1865, that Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger read General Order No. 3, which formally enacted the Emancipation Proclamation across the state. As such, Galveston, once home to the largest slave-trading port west of New Orleans, was also the spot where the last group of enslaved people in the United States heard a formal announcement that nearly 250 years of slavery on North American soil was over. Many of them called the day Jubilee, a term used in the Book of Leviticus to describe the moment at which Hebrew slaves and prisoners were freed in the land of Israel. In December 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution finally ended slavery in the United Stateswith the exception of punishment for a crimeand freedpeople in Galveston held the first Juneteenth six months later in 1866 to commemorate what they recognized as the official day of Jubilee.