Maya June Mansour

Juneteenth, 2025

In the Summer of 2019 I worked as a swim teacher at a YMCA on the South Side of Chicago. I worked with children between the ages four and seven teaching them how to swim. One of the first exercises that we would do with the kids would be having them put their face in the water and blow bubbles so they could get comfortable with the sensation of breathing out of their nose while underwater. Inevitably there would be at least one kid who would start to freak out about their idea of putting their face under water because they were scared. They would say “I don’t want to blow bubbles” in such a distressed tone that it really alarmed me on my first day of the job. I would watch in awe as the more seasoned instructors who had put in many more summers than me would gently yet firmly remind the panicked kids about all the adults that were there to keep them safe and that “sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do.” They would hold them in the water and eventually coax them to get their face wet and blow bubbles. It was like magic the way my coworkers would turn our student’s fear into comfort in a matter of minutes. Then, they would turn to me and remind me that swimming is a “life saving skill” that these kids' parents were paying us to teach them, and we couldn’t let them leave without at least trying to blow bubbles. That same summer, I also happened to read the book Asking Questions: A Challenge to Fundamentalism by Bahíyyih Nakhjavání. In this book, Nakhjavání presents the idea that humanity is “collectively emerging from a period of adolescence.” Because of this stage in our development, she claims that we must be cognizant of the limitations of our adolescent definitions for concepts like “freedom” and “justice,” and in that cognizance we should push ourselves to develop more mature definitions of these words as our society advances. When thinking about how we define freedom in our period of collective adolescence, I immediately thought of the kids in my swim classes who didn’t want to blow bubbles. When our notion of freedom is that it allows people to “do or say whatever they want,” the crying child that doesn’t want to go to bubbles doesn’t learn how to swim because their “freedom” to abstain from blowing bubbles is respected over the greater goal of them learning how to swim. But, as my coworkers pointed out to me, sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do in a protected setting for the sake of learning something that could save your life down the road. In Asking Questions: A Challenge to Fundamentalism, Bahíyyih Nakhjavání asserts that freedom can’t exist without parameters like this. She imagines an idea of freedom that acknowledges that we are all beholden to each other, where interconnectedness is not a side-effect of collective freedom, but a function of it- a safeguard. Rather than “being able to do whatever we want,” we evolve to actually want to do what we can for the sake of the collective. Today, it’s Summer 2025 and it has been six years since I worked as a swim teacher at that YMCA on the South Side of Chicago. Every year, I revisit Nakhjavání’s musings on freedom and every year, I am reminded of our society’s adolescence. I take time to sit with the dissonance of being told that I have immense freedom because I live in this country, a place where I’m treated like a second class citizen because of my Blackness. In this country, the price of that “freedom” is that my tax dollars fund holocaust, genocide and war, destroying the lives of millions in Palestine, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, and so many other countries. I refuse to accept this perverted idea of freedom, that my comfort comes at the cost of another’s wellbeing. On Juneteenth, I like to take a page from the Passover playbook. For me, asking questions about where we’ve been and where we’re going is key component of the annual ritual that Juneteenth offers. I reflect on my lineage as a Black southerner and try, in the spirit of Bahíyyih Nakhjavání, to imagine where we could possibly go from here, as we emerge from our adolescence, and how I can contribute to my global community as we chart our collective freedom. While we celebrate the liberation of our Texan ancestors from chattel slavery (two years after the rest of the country’s enslaved population), I think of Fannie Lou Hamer’s words when she said that “nobody is free until everybody’s free.” In my reflections and imaginings, Juneteenth creates a portal into a new world. In this world, both past and future simultaneously unfold, informing the decisions we make in the present. There, we weigh our actions through the lens of being a good descendant and being a good ancestor. We practice veneration and we tend to planted seeds, not because someone told us to but because it is our way of life. Juneteenth offers us an opportunity to imagine what the whole world could be like if we infused the energy that was released on June 19, 1865 in Galveston, Texas into everything we do.