Blackness isn’t a commodity; don’t let it get hijacked…oh yeah, it’s Juneteenth

I grew up in a Black America where our history didn’t get the full coverage and respect that it was due. It was a time when too many white folks at best strived to be color blind and reduce racial differences to the cringe-inducing melting pot concept. In the 70s through the very early 90s when I became an adult, race was prickly outside of Black spaces. As a member of Generation X, we were the first generation to integrate with white folks en masse, and while connections formed, often they were tenuous.

Comfort was found in Black spaces even with the intra-community struggles that were present: colorism and critique of speech and social habits were fair game in those spaces. I had my own moments with cousins and neighborhood kids for “speaking like a white girl.” Still, even with the shit, there was a sense of community and care.

I was raised to speak to my fellow Black folks; to acknowledge their existence. If you didn’t speak, you gave a nod. It was our way of seeing one another. Even in our public spaces, away from white gaze, we spoke to one another. As a kid and younger adult, half the joy of going to the hair salon or barber shop was the sense of community. It was listening in on conversations that you weren’t quite old enough to join but understanding that just listening was a sacred practice. No one told you that, you just instinctively knew it. Like when your parents had people over on the weekends or holidays and you were little, you tucked away, listening to grown folks business, staying quiet as a church mouse lest they sent your behind to bed. But that listening paid off as you grew older and you realized that in those moments, that is when Black folks take off their masks and shit gets real. It was the space when after a few too many cocktails, your play auntie took off her wig and got comfortable.

The Black experience of my youth was double Dutch, pickles, Now and Laters—all infused with understanding that life was hard and unfair and that white folks seemed to be at the root cause of a lot of Black folks’ struggles.

Fast forward to today and, well, now we understand and use the language of structural inequity and white supremacy and folks can make careers talking about this stuff. Yeah, I am looking at myself but at the same time, something is lost. Something that once connected us as a people has become increasingly diluted and threatens us as a people.

In the last week, I have had a few experiences that brought home the generational divides of what blackness in America looks like and as we prepare to celebrate Juneteenth, it seemed timely to write this.

Last week, I was heading back home to my island on a late boat, and I noticed a large Black American family. They clearly weren’t day-trippers given that they were on the 9:15 p.m. boat, but what stood out was their clear ease of being on the boat. Vacationers, perhaps?

As we were boarding, I accidentally brushed up against one of the elders of the group and muttered sorry and proceeded to my seat. I literally felt my sprit being snatched up and hearing my grandmother’s voice telling me I had better home training. A rushed and muttered sorry works in white spaces but where I come from, that was a “what the fuck is wrong with you” moment. I spent the boat ride home feeling embarrassed about forgetting my manners but also intrigued about this large multi-generational group that looked like a family reunion.

Well, it turned out the group had been curious about me, wondering what a Black American woman was doing on the island. I will spare you the play by play, but we struck up conversation as we were getting off the boat and I learned this family had once owned a summer place on my very island. They were on the island to celebrate the 65^th wedding anniversary of their elders, who at 87 and 90 were still very alive to enjoy the surprise their family had planned for them. Their daughter had arranged to rent the house her parents once owned on this island—from the 70s to mid-90s, they owned a little cottage right on the back side of the island facing the ocean.

I have lived on this island for a decade now and have never heard of a Black family owning summer property out here. I ended up talking with the daughter and her husband for a bit as we walked up the hill from the boat and exchanged numbers, and she invited me to come have a drink with them over the weekend.

I walked home floating, just excited to have met these people, not really expecting to see them again. I mean it’s 2025, who just invites a stranger over and what stranger actually shows up?

I woke up the next morning to a text from Lara, the daughter, sharing a bit of unknown-to-me Black history about the place I have called home for the last decade and an invitation to visit her family before they headed home in a few days. We made a date for me to come visit and last Saturday afternoon, I had the pleasure of meeting with Lara, her husband, and her parents.

From the moment I walked through the door of what used to be their summer home, I felt like I had connected with long-lost family members. The parents wanted to know all about me, and it turned out that Lara not only had a connection to my day work, but it also turned out she had been following Black Girl in Maine on Facebook for years. We laughed, talked, drank champagne, and my visit felt way too short. I left with an invitation to visit them in Western Massachusetts or their summer place in Cape Cod.

Seriously, that chance encounter on the boat led to a meeting that filled my cup. To sit with Black elders in that space of Blackness that folks of a certain age instinctively understand. It used to be those connections and that camaraderie that sustained us as a people.

Which is why a few days later, when I spent a day at a local Black hair salon getting my hair colored and getting braids, the overwhelming silence of the space stood out. In my 23 years in Maine—between going to salons in both Boston and Maine—until recently there was an energy that seemed universal to me about the Black hair salon experience. Even in Maine, when more often than not the “Black” salons were really multicultural, the feeling was still one of banter and depending who was in the space, there might be some Black folks business.

However, as social media continues to shape our offline experiences, the Black shop experience has shifted as older beauticians give way to a newer generation that prefers a camera-ready experience. One where ring lights over the stations for snapping pics and posting on Instagram or TikTok has become the norm. But the communal sense of community that was once a hallmark of the Black American experience fades away.

I spent eight hours in the chair with two different stylists working on me and we exchanged very little in the way of personal connections. We did talk about the Paternity Court show that was playing on the television but the building of personal connection was missing and while they did a bang-up job on my hair—and I will be returning—it was a mildly jarring experience. And one that I am experiencing more often. In all my years of going to get my hair done, I have never gone to a shop and not had other Black women speak to one another outside of conversing with the stylists about their hair.

Increasingly, blackness feels performative and at times transactional, where our blackness has become another commodity in the marketplace. Since the rise of DEI, blackness is a commodity to be traded on, but what does it mean for a sense of community, particularly in places like Maine where we are still such a small percentage of the population.

Early last year I was commissioned to write a piece on Black leadership. As part of writing the piece, I interviewed a number of Black people in Maine who at various points have been referenced as Black leaders. I asked each interviewee about their sense of our community and the consensus was that our Black community is Maine is a work in progress and, honestly, I am being gentle because I don’t believe in sharing family business. I will just say that the overall tenor of each interview led me to killing the piece.

At the same time, on a national level, you would be hard-pressed to say there are any Black leaders that we as a collective could agree on. Depending on the demographic, some might say Barack Obama or Kamala Harris but for as many who would say their names, many more would say nobody.

Getting to be of a certain age, I worry that we can perform our blackness online or for the white gaze but it shows up less in our daily lives, and what does that mean in a country that is governed by white people who want to put us in our places and strip away the progress we have made? What does it mean when we gather to celebrate Juneteenth but we can’t speak or acknowledge one another when the event is not sponsored? What does it mean when we allow ourselves to be divided by color within our race or we tell biracial Black folks they aren’t Black enough?

Sure, the one-drop rule may be racist but guess who created it? It wasn’t us and historically, Black lineage of any percentage was enough to have you deemed Black. We are literally living in a time where in my lifetime, biracial Black folks went from being Black to now having some Black folks telling them they aren’t Black. There are many biracial Black folks who want to honor their full heritage and that is their choice, but that is not a given across the board. Or how about the erasure of Afro-Latinos. Blackness isn’t just a race; it is a cultural connection as well.

While I appreciate that Juneteenth has become a holiday, it also rings hollow as the majority culture in many ways attempts to hijack it and with the commoditization of blackness, we move further away from the spirit that allowed Juneteenth to become a thing.

Community events can be wonderful, but it is equally if not more important to think about how you navigate Black community and build and sustain it on a personal level. Remembering that community doesn’t mean you have to love everyone but understanding that the pieces make the whole.

Black people endured because we are a communal people and we can’t let this system take that away from us at a time when we will need each other more than ever.

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