Today our family celebrates freedom. We dance and sing because of emancipation for black enslaved people and to salute the autonomy of all humans. The 1863 declaration not only freed people; no more slavery mandated there also be a different sort of whiteness. This pronouncement required a new whiteness unlike the whiteness that was about lording over and possessing lives. Black no longer meant slave, thus white could no longer mean slave master.

In 1863, The Emancipation Proclamation declared freedom and it was not until 1865 that all enslaved people learned of their freedom. Each year Juneteenth is a good reminder that the movement to end oppressive whiteness is left unfulfilled. Saying enslaved people are free did not undo the whiteness that was taught to enslave.

I have not known another whiteness. Our system does not challenge me to be any other kind of white. While whiteness may not tell me I can own another human being, whiteness today still works to preserve racial inequality. The 1863 decree came with no plan to take apart the deftly established and unbalanced system whiteness fabricated – we are missing the efforts to undo the ways in which whiteness has influenced the hearts, minds and identities of white people.

I find myself asking what can Juneteenth mean for me, a white woman? What parts of me – my everyday – are influenced by the slave master whiteness that was never undone? What parts of me remain beholden to the whiteness that was created to sustain a system of inequity and racism? This day encourages us to imagine new ways for how to be white.

So we celebrate and we look for the ways we can continue to resist the destruction exacted by whiteness and the way we racialize and oppress. In this country, the cost of whiteness and racialization has been lives, souls and immeasurable pain.