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I see a lot of conversations about Juneteenth, but very few that center African-Americans from Texas nor centering the holiday in the specific cruelty of Texas racism. The same thing is happening w/conversations about Black Wall Street in Tulsa.
Specificity matters.
Specificity matters.
It's particularly important given how flat Black histories in Texas and Oklahoma are treated. I say this with kindness, but if you are not from there or are ancestrally from there & have consistently been invested, your voice on these chapters does not interest me as much.
It's important that ppl across the Diaspora connect w/each other's histories, but I will never not say it: specific chapters of history do not belong to all of us, and that is not anti-Diaspora to say that. I believe in your autonomy & stewardship of your history too.
Editors commissioning about Juneteenth & Tulsa: find qualified Black writers, and specifically African-American writers, to tell those stories. AAs in those states have literally held vigil for 100 and 160 + years against a lot of odds. Honor them by centering their descendants.
But Juneteenth is a uniquely Black Texas story that is so specific in its cruelty, resilience and audacity. You need people from Texas, who have been steeped in oral histories about holding vigil for a chapter of history America tried to erase, to do that justice. Period.
And trust me: I return this energy in kind. I do not want the voices not from Chicago, not of Chicago, writing about Cabrini Green and drowning out the distinct tenor of voices that have been reared, loved, despised, built & broken & run out and returned to, a place.
That said, I would like to see someone brave enough to confront how the American Diaspora's embrace of Tulsa and Juneteenth speaks volume about the classism & derision that many Deep Southerners feel, not wrongly, that the North has for her stories & tendency to fetishize them.
It would be a grave, grave mistake to think simply b/c you're Black and writing that you are above or exempt from the temptation to fetishize "little known" parts of the human experience.
Black death by the state has become a sort of Only Fans for publications for a reason.
Black death by the state has become a sort of Only Fans for publications for a reason.
To be clear: I'm not saying that non-AAs from Texas or Oklahoma, or people w/no lived experience in those states do not have a story to tell. What I am saying is that I do not think their voices should be centered above those that are the living embodiment of that survival.
I would actually love to read how perhaps a Kenyan or Ghanian-American was forced to reckon with the specificity of this chapter being from it, but not of it. What limits and connections did it confirm or reveal to you?
That's still Texas/Oklahoma specific.
That's still Texas/Oklahoma specific.
