JUNE DIVERSITY MESSAGE

Please take a couple minutes to read this beautiful message written by Emily Henry and the Diversity Committee.

June is the month in Chicago when the Platonic Ideal of summer becomes reality. The temperature and days are perfect and we can snicker at our sweltering friends and colleagues in Arizona and Florida who laugh at us as we endure January.

June is also Juneteenth Freedom Day which is June 19, 2022. This celebrates June 19, 1865 when news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached Texas 2.5 years after it was officially declared in 1863.

This is certainly a wonderful day of celebration, but it should be seen as a beginning, not an end in itself. What has followed since 1865 - the undermining impulses of Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, sharecropping, the horrendous terrorism of lynching, the rise of the KKK and now the mass shootings that happened recently at the Tops supermarket in Buffalo, NY where eleven of thirteen people shot were African American by an 18 year old Caucasian who deliberately targeted this supermarket because it was frequented by African American shoppers is just the most current outrage.

I often hear from some of my Caucasian sisters and brothers about how society is becoming more and more “color blind” over time, but when “legitimate” news sources repeat such lies as replacement theory and white nationalism, I can become discouraged and wonder if things will ever really change.

In order to mitigate my own sense of discouragement and maybe yours too, I would like to quote from Daniel Gillison, Jr. who wrote on June 17, 2021 for Juneteenth Freedom Day on the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) website:

“The wounds of historical, generational racial trauma run deep. And while confronting trauma is never easy, the willingness to be vulnerable and honest about it is always the first step toward healing. Juneteenth is an opportunity for us as an organization, as individuals and as a country to do just that. Some days may feel like three steps forward; other days may feel like two steps back. That’s ok. The important thing is that we don’t give up. That both together and by ourselves we keep striving, that we keep hoping, and that we keep building on the legacy of freedom our ancestors began. There is a saying in mental health: recovery is not linear. Healing is a work in progress. It turns out, freedom is too.”