Okay. Sloppy version of some thoughts for a talk I'm trying to get my bishop to let me give.
I'm going to celebrate Juneteenth for the first time this year. I'm replacing the 4th of July with it on my internal calendar, but that's not a thing they really need to know? You know what? Maybe they do. Put a pin in that.
Here's a thing you need to understand about me. I am not White. I look White. I sound White. I was raised to believe I was White. But I'm biracial. My mother was White and my father was Black. He didn't want to be Black and hated his Blackness because his father/my grandfather was racist. Nevertheless, he was Black.
My grandfather was racist because he grew up in my hometown, which is a deeply racist place. It's a town that's still semi-segregated, especially in neighborhoods. The KKK exists there. They burned crosses and actually tried to murder someone by bombing their house back in 1968. They did a march down Main Street when I was 2. My father was lynched by the police there in 2009 when I was 19 years old.
I can never go back to that town. I don't take pride in being from there. I never want to go back. It's a violent and despicable place I've been trying to escape from for my entire life. In my recurring nightmares where I'm not waking up for a math final I didn't study for, I'm trapped in that town with no way to escape.
I was an adult when I found out about my Blackness. I had just come home from my mission from Brazil and gotten married. I was sitting in my living room, doing genealogy on a laptop, when I received an email from a cemetery I had contacted in Canada. My grandmother, who had passed as White, finally told me a useful piece of information about her birth family. She told me the name of the cemetery where her mother was buried in Montreal. I had contacted them and paid them $5 to tell me everything they knew about her. The email had arrived.
When I opened it, it unlocked the floodgates of every secret my family had kept from me. My father was Black. My grandmother was Black. My great grandmother was Black. There was a grand conspiracy of passing as White among so many of them, but they were all Black. And I finally knew the truth.
I have worked hard to put the pieces of this story back together. I have used every tool available to me, including the family history records provided to me by the Church. Here's what I discovered. It's the convergence of two family lines.
Through one, the migration of slaves from Richmond, Virginia to the Maritime provinces of Canada during the War of 1812. The British Empire promised freedom to any slaves who would reject this country and fight against their masters. John and Mary Liston lived in Nova Scotia and died there as free people of color, having achieved their freedom by turning their back on this country and never looking back. Their descendants remained there where they intermarried with Black immigrants to Canada from the Caribbean.
Across the world, an 11 year old girl was held in bondage to a Jewish family from Portugal, living in Barbados. The British Empire paid every slave holder the fair market value of a human being to free all of their slaves. I have the receipt from when Caroline Pinheiro was purchased by the British empire and freed. She was designated as Coloured, meaning she was mixed race, no doubt with a White enslaver father and a Black enslaved mother. Her son, Charles, joined the British Navy as a cook and immigrated to Canada. He worked as a railway porter and clawed tooth and nail for a decent living. He bought a house. He sent his children to school. He built a life for himself in Canada that Black people were not allowed to build for themselves in America without having their houses burned down, their bodies lynched, their livelihoods destroyed. He died in Montreal in 1944, near the end of WWII.
His son-in-law, my great grandfather, was one of the first Black men to serve in a white regiment from Canada in WWI. I have his military service record because Canada gives those away for free. His body was nearly destroyed during the war and he suffered horribly from PTSD for the rest of his life. He died estranged from his family in Montreal in 1974.
My grandmother was born at the onset of WWII. The earliest years of her life were a total mystery to her, and they still are to me, despite all the work I've done to put the pieces together. She was sent to live with a foster family in Montreal, where she was raised. She would only see her birth family for holidays. She married and divorced young before moving to California in 1963. She died in 2016, not knowing any of this because she never wanted to engage with it. She was shut out from her Canadian family for being too White, her American family for being too Black, and that chaos was the environment in which my father was raised, and into which I was eventually born.
I was raised to keep this secret. I was raised to live in shame of who and what I am as a biracial person. I was able to do the one thing my father and grandmother wanted more than anything else, which was to pass completely as White, and I refuse to do that. I will not live in shame or apology to anyone for being exactly who and what I am.
Because I served my mission in Brazil, I learned in fine detail many aspects of the Church's history in relation to race. I learned that anyone with a Black great grandparent wouldn't have been allowed to enter the temple or serve a mission. That meant me. I would've been told I was cursed. I would've been told I was a fence sitter in heaven. I would've been mocked and degraded for not being White enough, as many Black people have been in their interactions with members of the Church. And every single one of my ancestors would have been segregated from full participation in the Church for most of their lives. At the time my father was born, the racial restriction was still in effect. It wasn't lifted until my father was 12 years old. I am in a community with a legacy of racial segregation that was designed to keep my family out. And even after the racial restriction was lifted, mixed race families were openly advocated against by Church leaders for significantly longer. I can find condemnations for interracial marriage, against my own existence, right now in the Topical Guide, courtesy of Bruce R. McConkie.
In the words of William Faulkner, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
I am the first generation in my family who would've been able to receive the full blessings of the restored gospel, to be wholly unbound by the Church's racial restriction for the entire duration of my lifetime. I was placed in this generation, in this exact moment in time, for a purpose. I am the one who will bring the restored gospel to generations of my family who could not have received it in life. I am the one who will bring the impacts of the Church's racial restrictions to an end for them. I was called to that purpose by being born into this family. The restored gospel is mine to claim, exactly as I am, and no one will ever take it away from me. Not in this life or the next. We were not less valiant in the preexistence. We were not cursed. We were hated. There is a difference. And nothing about that hatred and prejudice has any right to keep the restored gospel away from me and my family anymore. I will not allow it, and none of you should allow it to happen to anyone else ever again. (This line is about queer and undocumented people.)
Many of you celebrate the 4th of July. You've lived to see the day when Juneteenth became a national holiday, but maybe you don't know what it represents. It represents the actual end of slavery, when the last slaves were freed in Texas. Even though the Emancipation Proclamation became law in 1863, freedom didn't come for many enslaved people in the South until after the end of the Civil War in 1865. June 19th, 1865 was when actual government agents had to go to Texas to forcibly free the slaves who were still in bondage there. Law wasn't enough to guarantee anyone their rights, so the government had to step in and force White slave holders in Texas to comply with the law. And that moment in time has repeated itself, over and over again, where those in violation of the law have to be forced into compliance when it comes to human rights for Black people. It's a fight that is still ongoing and affects more people than you realize.
If the 4th of July is a day to celebrate the end of colonial dependency and tyranny from the British, Juneteenth is a day to celebrate the end of bondage and inhumanity Americans commit against each other. It's a day to decide to never again perpetuate the atrocities that have made this country a violent prison to so many. It's a day to overcome racial separations with love and reconciliation, to show respect to those who are othered outside of Whiteness, to embrace freedom and justice for all people. It's a day to right wrongs, to give apologies, to make restitution to the oppressed. For those who are freed and for those who love them, it's a day of celebration. For those who are or have been oppressors, it's an invitation to mourn and repent.
I want my community to be able to stand in both of those positions. I want them to be able to celebrate with me. But to do that, you have to understand a lot of things about me that are uncomfortable for you to hear. You have to take in this information about your own part in this as a community, the injuries you and your families have done to Black people by maintaining and supporting the race restrictions, and grieve what has been lost. You have to look around at your all-white congregations and recognize how and why they happened. You have to see and feel the pain that represents. You have to sit in that discomfort and know things about the institution you love, beside people like me, and not make us sit in it alone.
Y'all want so badly to say the Church is changed, but we can't even openly talk about any of this at Church without it being a terrifying experience for everyone involved. That's not change! We haven't changed enough to act as done with this as we are! There are people who still live with the violent memory of the Church from when it was segregated. I've met them and spoken with them. There's healing to do, and it starts with each one of us taking responsibility for it.
All this to say, I'm bringing the J. Reuben Clark piñata to the cookout. Y'all are welcome to come. And please: season your food! No, putting uncooked onions in the funeral potatoes does not count!
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