By: Racine R. Henry, PhD, LMFT, CCTP
Juneteenth is a holiday that recognizes and celebrates enslaved Black people in Texas learning of the Emancipation Proclamation and their legal freedom on June 19, 1865. Despite slavery being abolished two years prior and the Emancipation Proclamation being signed in 1863, slavery continued in many southern states until December of 1865. Independence Day is widely known as July 4th and taught in schools as the day of our country’s freedom, yet Juneteenth is a holiday that many people don’t learn about until adulthood. While it has been a day of celebration hallmarked by gatherings and parades since 1866, Juneteenth only became a federal holiday in 2021. For Black people in this country across the diaspora, the seemingly reluctant acknowledgment of a significant day in U.S. History reflects the reality of our experience in two Americas: one that we continuously co-create with our ancestors and communities and the other that we have to navigate while remaining both unseen and misunderstood.
As a Black therapist, I’m often asked about best practices to treat Black clients and/or considerations for working with couples and families in the Black community. I tend to oscillate between feeling excited and irritated by this question. It makes me happy that my colleagues want to provide the best possible care for those who look like me, but it is also frustrating that the Black experience is seen as “a thing” rather than a highly nuanced existence that is multifaceted and impossible to capture in a formulaic manner. There is no big answer to treating Black people as we are not a monolith or a foreign entity. To begin to understand what it means to live in the U.S. and identify as a Black person involves learning about the marred history of this country and how institutional racism, white supremacy, and racial/ethnic marginalization show up in every facet of life. This does not mean that Black people should be pathologized but rather that life for Black people, in my opinion, involves an ever-present awareness of our Black identity and what that could mean for those we encounter.
Marriage and Family Therapy, as a profession, encourages clinicians to embrace a client’s reality, take on their multiverse, and hold their truths as our own. As a field, we can support the Black community by acknowledging that our beloved models and approaches were not designed with this population in mind. We can think critically about how racism and white supremacy show up in the way Black populations are represented in research and discussed in peer-reviewed journals and texts. We can create more explicit standards in our MFT training programs around how students are taught to clinically treat Black people, rather than promoting vague concepts like cultural competency or colorblindness. We can hold each other accountable for the lack of congruency between what we do as clinicians and how we treat one another as people and colleagues. We often talk about Self Of The Therapist or Person Of The Therapist as crucial to doing efficacious work yet neglect to be as introspective about how Black MFTs are regarded.
Juneteenth, as a holiday, should remind us that the legal enslavement of Black people is part of the not-so-distant history of this country and that the concept of freedom can be a façade when considering the continued demonization and disenfranchisement of Black people in our very current society. Beyond the therapy room, conference halls, and pages of literature, every MFT, whether in training or enjoying tenure, should strive for alignment between how they approach clients being cared for and how they treat those in the larger community. As written on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture website, “The historical legacy of Juneteenth shows the value of never giving up hope in uncertain times”. Juneteenth is about celebrating freedom from being treated and seen as three-fifths of a person without identity, community, or value. There is very little to be certain of both in this country and globally, but it is important that we, as MFTs, instill hope in our Black clients for a future full of promise, positivity, and alleviation of what is causing them pain. My personal hope is that we begin to set the standard across mental health professions of what it looks like to be congruent in both practice and personhood.