Look at The Root

I read a conversation initiated by a post on Black American Threads this Juneteenth on who this day really is for—Black Americans — someone argued that “Black American specificity makes people uncomfortable precisely because it disrupts a fantasy — the fantasy that Blackness in America is something everyone can equally claim.”

In the poster's view, Juneteenth is not a “shared symbolic holiday”. It is a specific historical event, and treating it as anything else erases the people it actually belongs to.

I understand the instinct behind that, but I don't agree with where it lands.

Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865 — over two years after the Emancipation Proclamation — when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas finally received word that they were free. That history is specific and it deserves to be told accurately.

But those freed that day were descendants of Africans, carried generations earlier into a forced lineage that didn't end at one plantation or one state line. Saying this day belongs only to Black Americans, and that anyone else honoring it is erasing the story, is closing the door on the rest of the family.

When the wider diaspora and the continent join in honoring Juneteenth, they are not erasing anything. They are doing what family does when one branch finally receives news of freedom — they celebrate with you.

That was just where the post started. The bigger claim came next — a whole theory about why Caribbean people, continental Africans, and the rest of the diaspora supposedly resent that specificity in the first place.

And there is a question almost no one in that conversation was asking — the absence of it tells us something.

When someone builds an entire framework explaining what an entire group of people secretly feels and why, the obvious next question never comes: who told you that? Who showed you that? Where did that belief come from—Instead, the theory is delivered as revealed truth—the poster answers for an entire people without ever asking them.

What time on the continent has taught me is the answer he is avoiding. Sitting across from continental brothers and sisters, hearing plainly how we've been painted to one another, and seeing for myself the results of their own conditioning — it is propaganda, it is conditioning, it is generations of deliberate distortion in how Black Americans are taught to see Africa and how Africa is taught to see us.

The same forces that built the wound are still profiting from keeping us pointed at each other —instead of at them.

That question leads to a harder one underneath it: who benefits when we believe the worst about each other's motives? Not Black Americans. Not Caribbean people. Not continental Africans. Every framework that convinces us our cousins are secretly competing with us for "symbolic capital" serves the same system that built the wound in the first place — keeping African people from recognizing each other across the water.

But underneath the theory sits something the poster never named, and I think it's the real root of the whole post. It is closer to a kind of orphaned ache —Indigenous nations have land. Haiti has land. Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados — each has a name tied to soil, a culture rooted in a place you can point to on a map. And underneath the specificity argument is a quieter, harder grief: why don't we get that too?

Here is what gets missed in that grief — something was created. Out of that very longing, out of that very rupture, Black Americans built a culture so complete it reshaped the world. Blues. Gospel. Jazz. Hip hop. A whole language, a whole rhythm, a whole spirit that the rest of the diaspora and the continent itself now reach for and celebrate as a thread of reclamation. That culture is the identity. It already is the land that was never given back in soil.

But conditioning runs deep enough to keep us from seeing it that way. We have been taught that identity must be tied to something tangible — land, nation, citizenship, a flag, a border. Not a sound. Not a feeling. Not a culture born from survival. So instead of claiming the culture itself as the homeland, the deeper reach goes toward the only tangible thing in view — the nation that did the stealing.

And this is where the wound turns on itself one more time. When the Caribbean, the continent, the wider diaspora celebrate Black American culture — when they sample it, wear it, study it, reclaim it as part of the larger Black story — it is read by some as theft. As people trying to take credit, soften the culture, claim ownership of something that isn't theirs.

But it is the opposite. It is recognition. It is family reaching toward family. The very thing being grieved as absent — being seen, being claimed, belonging to something larger — is happening in real time, and conditioning has made it look like an attack instead of an embrace.

The root does not change. It only sends up new branches and hopes you will mistake them for the tree.

Look at the root.