Juneteenth Isn’t Just for Blacks…

President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863.  Enslaved Africans in Texas did not get the memo for another two years.  But on June 19, 1865, Union soldiers landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that these enslaved Africans were now "free."  It would evolve into the annual festival known as "Juneteenth."

History tells us that things were not so simple.  Africans in America and their descendants continued to be controlled in various ways, whether through the system of laws that would become known as Jim Crow, or domestic terrorism of the Klan and its enablers.  A particularly heinous form of state-sanctioned control was the criminalization of blackness under the guise of "public safety."

Rationalizing continued slavery by using cases of criminal acts created a legacy that haunts Americans to this day.  Douglas A. Blackmon (in Slavery by Another Name) chronicles how slavery continues for those convicted of "crime."  These crimes included profound threats to public safety as speaking too loudly in the presence of a white woman--for which offenders could find themselves sentenced to work in labor camps or chain gangs for decades.

Just as slavery, by whatever name, eventually gave way to Jim Crow, Jim Crow was replaced with the "New Jim Crow."  It is the latest version of a caste system that keeps black Americans (now expanded to include anyone that chooses differing behavior or opinions than the status quo) as new targets threatening our security, safety and “way of life.”  This system emerged in the decades following the civil rights revolution, driven largely by the War on Drugs and Homeland Security.

The results remain the same: convicted of crime, “new threats” are locked up and locked out of full citizenship for life. 

I wonder what those newly emancipated Africans in 1865 Texas would think if they could travel through time to 2013? What would they make of a post-Emancipation America where there are more blacks in prison, jail, probation, or parole than were enslaved in 1850? 

Or that more black (or any color) men are legally denied the right to vote because of felon disenfranchisement laws, than in 1870, when the 15th Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that deny the right to vote on the basis of race? 

How would they make sense of the fact that it all still exists 50 years after their descendants faced bullets, bombs and beatings to secure civil rights in the 1960s that remained unprotected after the Civil War?

Indeed there is a long, consistent history of abuse to blacks in America...and Irish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Native Americans…many Hispanics and Muslims would argue similarly.  Then there are the poor.

This is written on the 150th anniversary of Juneteenth as a reminder about the long, tenuous and CONTINUING struggle for racial equality, an all-inclusive equality that was assumed to be an inherent factor of "emancipation."  Or maybe it is incurring subtle commentary and comparison on the value of life.