Juneteenth is a celebration of everyone knowing the truth. We need that desperately.

It’s commonly accepted that Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery. That’s not actually true. President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, but it wasn’t until June 19, 1865, that the Union Army finally reached the enslaved in Galveston, Texas, to tell them that they were free.

Think about that. The significance of the celebration is not that people were free, because on paper they already were. The law was on their side. But that law didn’t mean anything if they didn’t have the information. That was what determined their reality.

The truth was irrelevant without the knowledge. We’re still grappling with that concept 160 years later.

The country is seeing a systematic scaling-back and distortion of American history, particularly any parts that tell the truth of racial wrongs like slavery.

The simultaneous military parade in Washington, D.C., and the “No Kings” rallies around the country last weekend were each presumably attended by people with distinctly differing opinions who get their news and information from distinctly different places. Each set of people exist in a world where the other group is the problem — where things are passionately right over here and vehemently wrong over there.

The morning of those events, a Minnesota politician and her husband were assassinated, and another attacked alongside his wife. Half the country seems to believe that the accused shooter was a radical leftist — though those who knew him say he voted for President Donald Trump and was a conservative Evangelical Christian. But because sources they trust say otherwise, including a particularly vicious senator with a terrible X account, they believe it.

It doesn’t make it true. But what does truth matter if you’re not getting that information?

The divide here is the sinister effort to make sure information is limited. Knowledge is power, and those in charge know this. I often think about those enslaved people in Texas, where Juneteenth has been celebrated since 1866, the first anniversary of that precious announcement. It must have been bittersweet, acknowledging both the joy of those freedoms being enacted and the understanding they had toiled in bondage for 2 1/2 years more than they had to.

They were already free on paper. But it didn’t matter if nobody told them.

We are in such a perilous place in this country, and honestly, it’s all spiraling so fast that I have no idea if the words I am writing one day will be released into a different reality the next. There is a constant tidal wave of information coming at us, so fast and furious it feels assaultive.

We are right to be particular about the sources of that knowledge, about who vetted it or didn’t and why. We are right to ask questions that challenge the reality that we are being presented. We have to keep doing that.

When Juneteenth became a national holiday, its critics called it made up, which is not only racially dismissive but really stupid. All holidays were made up by somebody. You know about how Christmas, the celebration of Jesus’ birth, was supposedly placed on Dec. 25 to coincide with existing pre-Christian celebrations? Somebody decided that. Mother’s Day? Created. Father’s Day? Ditto. The current administration is creating and renaming military holidays right now.

The reason that Juneteenth didn’t seem real to some — besides the fact that they might just be racist, not think slavery was bad and just don’t like Black people to have any joy — is that they’d never heard of it.

That’s bunk. Truths exist outside of your understanding.

The current denial of reality, either historically or in real time, is a frightening thing, a terrifying war on a populace desperate to make sense of the rapidly changing landscape. Sometimes we cling to what we know, to the things that comfort us, even in ignorance. The enslavers in Texas knew that they were supposed to have released their human chattel. But they ran out the clock until they were forced, at literal gunpoint, to do so.

This Juneteenth, I want you to just look at the information you are given. You don’t have to believe me and what I’m saying. Check it out. Click the links.

The truth will set us free.