Juneteenth is this weekend. Now a federal holiday, it remembers June 19, 1865, the day the last enslaved people were freed in the USA. That is more than three years after the Emancipation Proclamation. And more than two months after the Confederate surrender. (You can read more on that in this Wikipedia article.)

For this year’s observance of Juneteenth, I’m reading Stacey Abrams’ Leading from the Outside.

Abrams’ book is helping me learn more about how people grow in leadership when the systems aren’t designed to help them. All leaders have self-doubt. But as my friend Denise Jacobs says, it’s not all “inner-critic” doubt. Sometimes that critical voice is coming from the culture outside of you, saying you don’t fit, that you can never make it. She referred me to this tweet:

Maybe you don’t have imposter syndrome. Maybe you’ve been treated like an imposter your entire career.

— Merci Grace (@merci) June 30, 2020

Getting educated on how to make the systems more equitable while helping people move through those systems seems a great Juneteenth activity.

How are you or your team observing Juneteenth this year?