I didn’t know until I was much older that growing up in Yellow Springs, Ohio, would forever unfit me to be a Black person in America.
This is because what I experienced there was freedom from a very different kind of slavery than that whose ending we celebrate on Juneteenth.
This slavery’s chains are formed not of metal but of words: invisible, and powerful precisely because they’re hidden. As slavery’s iron chains disappeared on that first Juneteenth, invisible chains of words tightened their grip.
These words have defined what blackness is from Black slavery’s beginnings in the world.
Over time, they became customs and beliefs forming an invisible bondage still with us today, largely unacknowledged because it’s seemingly normal.
They exist in questions asked of someone new — such as “Where are you from?” or “What does your father do?” Over time, I learned that because such questions are often not followed by development of friendship, there was actually only an invasive curiosity, not a true interest in getting to know me.
After many such experiences, I realized the problem: It was that the images in my mind didn’t meet the expectations of those who were asking, whether they were white, Black or anything else. These images had nothing to do with anything already imagined by others to be my inner world, that of a Black American.
Because of these images, always vibrantly alive in my mind, something was always off in the exchange, and the false questions represented the attempt to regain a more familiar track.
Yellow Springs was the origin of those images. As a small, rural community in the southwestern corner of Ohio surrounded by cornfields that sometimes transform into multitudes of bright yellow sunflowers all turned the same direction like a well-disciplined army, Yellow Springs might at first glance seem no different from small-town America anywhere. But it’s the second glance that’s telling.
It’s not just about the community’s celebrity as the home of Antioch College. The alma mater of Coretta Scott King, Antioch was a hotbed of civil rights activity and progressive viewpoints that helped bring her husband, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., to town for a graduation commencement speech on another Juneteenth — June 19, 1965.
It’s that, due to the community’s deep and ongoing historical commitment to anti-racism as a profound way of life, racial stereotypes and the silent expectations they engender could not take hold. The community and its inhabitants, no matter what color, thus lived free of those constraints.
An incident that gave me a deep understanding of the true meaning of my having grown up without feeling the damaging effects of racial stereotypes in my inner being occurred while I was a junior at Ohio University. Just before my freshman year, I entered a national competition sponsored by the now-defunct Mademoiselle magazine and won a place on its college board. From this, I became a college representative — providing product samples from the magazine’s advertisers to students in exchange for completed surveys. Seated at the long table in the student center, I watched young women arrive in groups of three or four, either all white or all Black.
One of the white women, trying hard to understand what she was seeing, asked, “What sorority is this for?” I replied that it wasn’t for a sorority but for Mademoiselle magazine. Silent for a time, browsing, she returned. Again, “What sorority is this for?” I realized I would need to go much deeper if I were to break through whatever was blocking her ability to understand. “Have you heard of Mademoiselle magazine, in New York City?” I said. She nodded. I asked if she had seen one of the promotional posters I had placed around campus. “Did you see the logo for Mademoiselle magazine on the poster?” She nodded again, and I repeated: “It’s for that Mademoiselle magazine.”
But then came the question from a Black woman. “How you get this?” was all she said, bluntly, eyes like darts. Under her anger, however, I also saw immense pain and hurt. Both women’s attitudes made me feel like an interloper.
But they also opened my eyes to something I had not previously seen. The path to where I sat was invisible to both of them, due to the same “enslaving” cultural beliefs. The Black woman saw a “white” magazine and thus an exclusionary white audience. The white woman seemed to think a “white” publication precluded a black readership, thereby making my visible connection to it an unimaginable anomaly.
Juneteenth is certainly a celebration of remembering slavery’s end. But if we are ever to end it in all its forms, Juneteenth must also be about the fight to end that “slavery” living on, unrecognized, in our minds.
Cyraina Johnson-Roullier is an associate professor of modern literature and literature of the Americas at the University of Notre Dame, an author and an essayist. She is working on a book exploring race, gender and the human through the lenses of law and utopia, and a memoir examining the interrelationship among race, resilience and cancer.
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