Juneteenth

...my take

Juneteenth just does not excite me. Black Americans have fought for equality and fairness since at least 1619 and a holiday celebrating such long overdue and unfinished business just doesn’t do it for me. I want to see America live up to its promise. I want to see America live up to the ideals it wrote down. I want to see fair and equal housing. Fair and equal lending practices. Fair and equal health outcomes. Fair and equal criminal justice.

I want to see equal life expectancies.

I want to see fair and equal neighborhoods with trees to increase the beauty and decrease the heat… street lights that work… law enforcement that doesn’t present itself as an occupying force… potholes repaired… trash that is picked up… light rail to where the good jobs are… good schools that have air-conditioning and text books that aren’t handed down when they become so outdated that White schools toss them out or hand them down. I want to see fair and equal zoning so that the crap businesses like pay day loans, pawn shops, and liquor stores are not concentrated in Black neighborhoods

I want to see schools that instill in students a desire to attend college, prepare them for college acceptance and then for college success. I want to see highways ripped up that were laid down to demolish Black neighborhoods in a program that the Federal Highway Administration – behind closed doors – called “getting rid of niggertown.”

I want to see chemical plants, industrial hog farms, and munitions dumps in other than minority neighborhoods. I want to see the United Daughters of the Confederacy - that I wrote about here - labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as the lying, hate mongering group that they are.

I want to see those 2,000 monuments and plaques to the Confederacy that still exist (and were largely installed by the UDC and that I wrote about here), be co-spaced with equally glorious and heroic statues or plaques explaining that the Civil War was started by traitorous insurrectionist for the sole purpose of keeping Black Americans enslaved, tortured, raped, and killed with impunity while keeping the belief intact of the God-given supremacy of the White race.

I want to see a certain Florida governor who waxed nostalgically about how slavery was a good and beneficial institution because it provided slaves - people who were enslaved for life as were their kids and their kids and their kids - a marketable skill when they were free, instead of simply attending a trade school that didn’t chain and flog them … well… I want to see that governor and his ilk… I dunno… maybe educated out of their deep prejudice and relentless stupidity. Except that education might be considered CRT and thus illegal to each.

When America experiences the tragedy of a pandemic that quickly takes Black lives faster than White lives, I want to not hear White people say, “Well it’s their fault. It’s because of the lifestyle that they choose.”

I want to be able to turn to Netflix and not have to search for an hour or more to find a movie with a Black protagonist who isn’t recovering from addiction, a stint in prison, or as a gang member and who is not an ultra-heroic, super bad-ass cop. I just want to find a movie to watch that depicts Black people doing normal stuff as easily as I can find a movie with White people doing normal stuff…the kind of movie that is prevalent and normal in the British films that I turn to more and more.

I want to be protected by a Supreme Court that doesn’t seem to always come down on the side of White America or wealthy businesses and who apparently has no clue that voter suppression – which I wrote about here - and White supremacy are alive and well.

I want a president who permits Haitian refugees who are fleeing for their lives from a country that America significantly helped marginalize, degrade, and impoverish as quickly and happily as he allows in White Dutch Afrikaan refugees who are fleeing from…well…from nothing. I want a president who does not designate Brown countries as “shit holes” and fantasizes publicly about immigrants from Norway. A want a president who does not campaign by picking at the scab of racism, and I want an American population that won’t tolerate it.

I want a congress that is not forever whining about the taxes Americans pay that the policy makers believe go to safety net programs for poor people, aka Black people. I want representatives that are not forever cutting those safety net programs that protect Black and other poor and disadvantaged people who endure life in poor neighborhoods with poor schools, have poor chances of attending college, are poorly nutritioned, have poor public transportation to where the good jobs are, no father at home because he is in prison because they live in a country that incarcerates .4% of the White population but 2.29% of the Black population – a rate almost 6 times higher in a population that is about 75% smaller - and then passes the tax savings back to the White elite super wealthy who were “wrongfully taxed out of money” that “rightfully belonged do them” by “dint of their unassisted hard work” performed as they “picked themselves up by their bootstraps.”

I’ll probably get more excited about Juneteenth when “states’ rights”, “entitlement”, “taxes”, the drive to end the Affordable Care Act, and the successful attempt to convince a large swath of America that Obama was not an American after all, are not all code talk for, by, and directed to White supremacist.

I’ll probably get more excited about a holiday that celebrates an event that happened 160 years ago - the two month late announcement to the enslaved in Texas that they were now free - when those intervening years have more meaning and have seen more progress.

I’ll feel more celebratory when the race-based January 6^th insurrection isn’t celebrated and pardoned, and when we elect a president who is not in a mad rush to kill everybody on death row – 41% of whom are Black. As famed death row defense attorney Bryan Stevenson told me and CCP co-founder Mara Ferris when we met with him in Montgomery last November, “This country treats guilty people with money better than it treats poor people who are innocent.”

Otherwise, I honestly do not know what is being celebrated. The slow-as- cold-molasses pace of progress I guess.