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After
the United States Senate and House in quick succession passed
a federal bill
to make “Juneteenth” a federal holiday to commemorate the
end of slavery, President Joe Biden wasted no time in signing
the bill into law.
“Making Juneteenth a federal holiday is a major step forward to
recognize the wrongs of the past,” said
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, expressing what has come to be
his party’s standard performative gesturing toward historic
racial injustices by a party that likes to set itself apart from
Republicans via lip service to liberal ideals.
To his credit,
Schumer added, “But we must continue to work to ensure equal
justice and fulfill the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation and
our Constitution.” Ensuring “equal justice” is
precisely the step that would carry real meaning and add teeth to the
very short, one-page
Juneteenth bill.
So why is that critical aspect missing from the bill?
There are many
historical
accounts
of how Juneteenth came about, but the most widely accepted one is
that enslaved Black people in Texas were the last in the U.S. to know
that they had the legal right to be free - two and a half years after
the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. The revelation that
freedom was at hand came from General Gordon Granger in Galveston on
June 19, 1865, and if ever there was a declaration of American
independence that carried any moral weight, it is the day that came
to be known as Juneteenth - rather than the Fourth of July and the
syrupy and blind patriotism that accompanies it.
When a wave
of mass protests
against racist police brutality swept the United States last summer
after George Floyd’s killing, corporate
America
began to acknowledge Juneteenth as an important day, “discovering”
what many Black communities had commemorated for years.
Then-President
Donald Trump
also took credit for publicizing it, saying with his usual audacious
ignorance, “I did something good: I made Juneteenth very
famous. It’s actually an important event, an important time.
But nobody had ever heard of it.” Since most white Americans
had likely not heard of Juneteenth, in the 45th president’s
mind, that meant nobody had. Trump made the comments in the context
of a controversial
political rally
that his reelection campaign scheduled for June 19, 2020, in Tulsa,
Oklahoma, the historical site of some of the nation’s
bloodiest racial violence.
A year later,
Democrats, with their newfound political power, are trying to set
themselves apart from Trump and the GOP. Rather than making
aggressive efforts to pass a hefty
infrastructure bill,
a minimum
wage increase,
or important voting
rights reform
- all of which would more substantially benefit Black Americans - the
party is now expecting credit for recognizing Juneteenth as a federal
holiday that all Americans can mark.
Congresswoman
Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, who sponsored the Juneteenth holiday
legislation, went as far saying,
“what I see here today is racial divide crumbling, being
crushed this day under a momentous vote that brings together people
who understand the value of freedom.” These words are as hollow
as the declarations of a “post-racial”
era
when Barack Obama was elected to the presidency in 2008.
What Democrats
are utterly failing to acknowledge is that when enslaved people were
declared free, that freedom meant an abrupt end to the horrific
injustices wreaked upon generations of Black Americans, but it also
meant almost no accountability or justice to compensate for what was
done to them, no payment for the centuries of stolen labor, no
redress for the violence, terror, family separations, sexual
assaults, grinding servitude, and other hard-to-imagine harms.
For Democrats
to make a symbolic gesture toward racial justice without the
financial redress that could actualize such justice is mere
posturing. Melina
Abdullah,
a leader in the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter and a
professor in Pan-African studies at California State University of
Los Angeles, made a statement
that cuts to the heart of what lawmakers need to hear, saying about
Juneteenth, “White folks need to sit this one out. It’s
not yours. Your acknowledgment should come in the form of
#reparations.” She added, “And by ‘white folks’
I mean government, corporations, and the individual white families
whose wealth is built on the stolen labor of Black folks.” Her
sentiments were widely
echoed
by other Black Americans on social media.
Neither party
appears to have the political courage to truly respect the idea of
racial justice for Black Americans. Democrats, who take great pride
in the symbolism of their history-making half Black, half Indian Vice
President Kamala Harris, are also going out of their way to censure
and silence Somali American Congresswoman
Ilhan Omar
of Minnesota for speaking uncomfortable truths. The liberal party
excels in performance over substance and in celebrating Black
Americans as long as they help meet diversity quotas but remain
subservient to the establishment.
In contrast,
Republicans have brushed aside all pretense toward respecting racial
equality altogether. The rabidly
racist
Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) almost objected to the Juneteenth bill,
saying,
“it still seems strange that having taxpayers provide federal
employees paid time off is now required to celebrate the end of
slavery.” (One wonders what the senator would deem acceptable
instead.) And in Texas, where the original Juneteenth celebrations
began and where the day was declared
a state holiday
earlier this year, Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill championed by Texas
Republicans to bar
the teaching of critical race theory
(CRT) in state schools. It is precisely the academic framework of CRT
that has helped to create a broad understanding of why Juneteenth is
important, and it is also what can help make the case for why
reparations must be central to racial justice.
Republicans
and conservatives have fought hard to ensure that injustices arising
from slavery remain the past and that there must be no accounting for
it in the present day. (These are often the same people who
righteously insist on preserving
Confederate-era statues
for the sake of history.) If only it were true that racial injustices
ended when slavery ended. But American society has remained hostile
to Black communities through persistent, ongoing, debilitating racial
discrimination and injustices even today. There has been no serious
federal acknowledgment in the form of accountability and compensation
either of historic injustices or present-day discrimination. Neither
Democrats nor Republicans are bold enough to embark on a project of
reparations, and instead the two major parties remain emotionally
invested in the myth of American exceptionalism.
Marking
Juneteenth as a federal holiday is only the first step toward
financial redress, not the last. The small town of Asheville,
North Carolina,
last year launched a program targeting Black residents for housing
and business opportunities without actually dispensing what matters -
money. The city of Evanston,
Illinois,
earlier this year went a bit further and began issuing $25,000
housing grants to Black residents to compensate for systematic
housing discrimination along racial lines. Amherst,
Massachusetts,
is exploring pathways to reparations, and even states like California
are considering steps for financial restitution.
Such efforts
indicate that the countless Black academics,
leaders,
journalists
and activists who have painstakingly made the case for reparations
for decades might be seeing some vindication. Now if only federal
lawmakers like Schumer, Ed Markey (D-MA), and Lee would use their
political clout to move beyond performative gestures, we might
believe they truly care about righting historical injustices in the
service of full equality.
This
commentary was produced by Economy
for All,
a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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