The Juneteenth Story Gives Us the Gift of Remembrance
The Earth is weeping and so are its people.
The waters are grieving and so are the people.
But we are also remembering.
Juneteenth is an opportunity to remember a story of struggle and a milestone in the story of liberation. This Juneteenth, Free Press’ Media 2070 project invites you into a breath of remembrance. We believe the power of storytelling, media-making and journalism can hold space for our grief and help us remember the feeling of freedom in our bodies. And our ability to own those stories from ideation through creation to distribution is a critical part of our collective liberation.
Journalism has a long history of alternately misrepresenting freedom movements as forms of terrorism, ignoring them or underreporting them. Media 2070 is attempting to repair those wrongs through our reparative journalism work.
Reparative journalism tells stories about the structural roots of our current realities and shares possibilities for repair and redress in all sectors. It is journalism that has acknowledged and begun making redress for the industry’s anti-Black history. It’s created within a process that invests an abundance of resources into Black voices, perspectives and needs.
Embracing the power of storytelling on Juneteenth
More than that, it is an invitation for remembrance — a call and demand for journalism to return to a type of storytelling that predates colonialism, a type of storytelling that helped us imagine the abolition of slavery, a type of communication that keeps the fight for reparations alive and well.
Reparative stories look like reporting on the history of land theft in the United States and on Indigenous communities on Turtle Island reclaiming acres of sacred sites. It reports on the militarism and corporate greed fueling the climate crisis and shares how community groups teaching herbalism are protecting ancient seeds our ancestors knew. It reports on the wave of twentysomethings reclaiming land and building family compounds where they grow their own food as a way to care for their community.
This Juneteenth, we honor the memory of a story. And we lean into the power of storytelling to help remind us of what we already know. The vision of 2070 is a future and past dream of a world where we tell stories in our own ways, from our own cultural understanding and within the lineage of our various storytelling traditions. And we will have the infrastructure, investment and freedom to do so.
We are on a path of both newness and return. We look forward to meeting you there.
