There is a version of Juneteenth that America prefers. It is the tidy one. The one that says enslaved Black people in Texas simply did not know they were free until June 19, 1865, when Union troops arrived in Galveston with the news. That version...

My mother introduced me to conversations about racism, injustice, power, and the contradictions of American society when I was still young. A lot of the lessons she passed down...