Racists Hate Juneteenth... Which Is Why It Exists.

Photo by Eye for Ebony on Unsplash

You can tell a lot about people by the things that outrage them.

As I write this, it’s Juneteenth, and all over America, from neighborhood social media sites all the way to Congress, profoundly bothered white people are engaged in wild histrionics over the fact that our nation acknowledges the event as a holiday.

Of course, this anger is a confession of sorts. It’s also an ironic and sad reminder that in the hearts of so many who call this place home, little has changed in 161 years. That’s the entire reason we’re here.

Juneteenth marks the day on June 19th, 1865, when Federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to declare the emancipation of all Americans, of every slave now being free. It shouldn’t even have been necessary. The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued two and a half years earlier by President Lincoln. Freedom under the law had arrived, yet because of the geographic fractures created by the war, many strongholds of institutionalized racism existed. Texas was the final area of this nation to surrender to this particular bend of the arc of the moral universe toward racial justice—and someone had to forcefully bring them the news they’d refused to come to terms with: the war was over.

Enslaved black people had been free for nearly three years, but this news had been withheld from them by a group of white Americans who did not want them to know that they were free and did not want them to be free. The truth was being held captive by people for whom racial equality was not a destination they wanted us to collectively reach, and so they fought to prevent progress and suspend national renovation.

Today, we might look at much of Texas and wonder if any time has actually passed, if the news of freedom ever reached some folks at all. 163 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, there are still people there and in Wisconsin and Iowa and Tennessee, and all over this country, who are trying to rewind the clock of national progress to a place where black people’s freedom is not a reality. There remains here an ignorant army of white bigots fighting to return to supposed American “greatness,” where the rights of people of color to live freely and determine their destination and have their voices heard are yet a long way off.

White supremacy is still working to ensure that black liberation is not complete. On this collective journey toward a just and fair nation, one where the universal worth of every human being is honored, the disheartening news is that we clearly are not all free yet.

But the good news (and it is very good news), is that we are not passive passengers on this trip. Each of us has proximity and agency and the expansive space of our choices. We have our individual wills and our circles of influence and our daily decisions and our social media profiles to usher in the news of equality’s truth.

Not only that, but we have our collective voices and our shared resources and our chosen communities to incarnate a place where more people experience the reality of their liberation.

161 years after the events of Juneteenth, in cul-de-sacs, on city streets, and in the halls of Congress, racists are still working tirelessly to silence people of color in the name of saving America, and the rest of us cannot give them an unimpeded path, especially those of us who share their pigmentation.

We need to continue marching into the fortified strongholds of racism and to the last holdouts against justice; in our homes and neighborhoods and schools and churches, and then to the polls. We need to declare unequivocally that all people are not yet free and deserve to be free. We need to forcefully confront the perverted theology, poisonous politics, irrational fear, and unacknowledged privilege that maintain this sickening status quo.

Until this happens, the cancer of racism will remain, and slavery will not be only in our shameful past, but in our grievous present and our uncertain future.

Every human being here deserves to find joy and to be truly free in their shoes and their skin and their heads, and until we see that day, the work of good people remains unfinished.

May we be a nation where racists and bigots finally realize they have lost the war for good.