Jackie's Academy

Keti Koti, “the chains are cut”, marks July 1, 1863, the official abolition of slavery in the former Dutch colonies of Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean. It is a day of remembrance, mourning, and celebration. It is also a day that forces the Netherlands to confront a truth it still struggles to hold: Freedom was declared on paper long before it was practiced in reality. Sound familiar?

Let me be crystal fucking clear: mutual aid ain’t charity. Charity is a hierarchy, with one group positioned as saviors and the other as the grateful poor. Mutual aid is a relationship. A refusal. A redistribution of care outside the state. Black communities have practiced mutual aid long before the term existed because this country has never been designed to protect us. We learned early that if we waited for these racist ass institutions to care, we would die waiting.

DISCLAIMER: My anti-racism trainings are available only to my paid subscribers. Keep this work inside our community. Do not share my content with people who have not invested in it. Do not use my material to teach your own anti‑racism sessions or to build your own “curriculum.” If you want to leverage my work beyond your personal growth, ask me. Yes, there will be a fee. Alright, y’all, let’s get straight to it.

I don’t talk about my personal life much. Y’all know that. I give you the lessons, the patterns, the history, the contradictions; not the behind‑the‑scenes of my home. But since this is for my paid community, I’m opening the door a little wider today.

Look, I ain’t arguing for a narrower definition of Blackness. I’m pushing back on the people who think they get to define it for us. There is a difference. And it’s a difference I’ve had to live inside my whole fucking life. I am a biracial Black woman who was raised by white people. White household. White town. White schools. White everything. I grew up surrounded by people who taught me to doubt my own Blackness before I even understood what the hell it meant.

Y’all, I have been doing a lot of recalibrating lately, not just in my work, but in my body. The more I pour into community, the clearer it’s become that I cannot keep showing up if I’m not tending to myself with the same intention. So today I’m pivoting. I’m talking about wellness in the way I actually live it: practical, accessible, and rooted in keeping my body and mind open, clear, and supported.

DISCLAIMER: My anti-racism trainings are available only to my paid subscribers. Keep this work inside our community. Do not share my content with people who have not invested in it. Do not use my material to teach your own anti‑racism sessions or to build your own “curriculum.” If you want to leverage my work beyond your personal growth, ask me. Yes, there will be a fee.

Juneteenth ain’t a vibe, a theme, or a color palette. It ain’t an excuse for corporations to roll out red‑black‑green merch they don’t understand. It ain’t a day for white people to cosplay freedom. Juneteenth is the day our ancestors in Texas were finally told what had already been true for two years: they were free. It is the day we mark the gap between law and reality, between what this racist country claims and what it actually does.

“If you were a young black person living in Britain, you couldn’t be a policeman, an ambulance man or fireman. You couldn’t go into pubs, hotels, swimming pools, and now you couldn’t drive on the buses. I had been watching the amazing things that Martin Luther King had been achieving in America, and now I thought something had to be done here too.” ~Paul Stephenson Paul Stephenson © Ros Martin Jackie's Academy is a reader-supported publication.

For three years, I built a community on Threads. Not a hobby, not a pastime; a community. Thirty‑seven thousand people who showed up for analysis, clarity, and unapologetic Black truth-telling. I built that space post by post, conversation by conversation, with the kind of consistency that platforms claim to reward. And then, without warning, Meta erased it.