On Juneteenth, Telling the Truth About American History
By Hany Khalil
On Thursday, after years of advocacy, President Biden signed legislation making Juneteenth a federal holiday.
Juneteenth has been a holiday in Texas since 1980, but unlike Confederate Heroes Day in February, state employees still don’t have the day off.
This status reflects the history of the day itself, which commemorates the day word of the Emancipation Proclamation finally reached enslaved African Americans in Galveston in 1865, fully two and a half years after it was signed.
Juneteenth is a day to celebrate emancipation from the horrors of American slavery and Black resilience and joy in the face of white supremacy. It’s also a day to acknowledge the incompleteness of efforts to overcome the stubborn legacy of racial oppression, failures that have ensured that Black Americans today still lack equitable access to opportunity.
Though slavery was abolished more than 150 years ago, anti-worker economic policies, disinvestment in urban communities, and racial inequality in the labor market make ladders of oportunity few and far between for Black Americans.
Black workers experience substantially higher levels of unemployment and underemployment than white workers, undermining the social fabric of Black communities and African Americans’ economic security.
Black Texans are much more likely to work in low wage service jobs, live in crowded and dangerous housing, have underlying health conditions, and lack health insurance. As a result, COVID-19 has had a disproportionately deadly toll on Black people in Texas.
Since the civil rights movement, unions have been a vital tool for African Americans to obtain access to the middle class, leading Black Americans to be more pro-union than any other demographic group in the country.
Black Americans will continue to be stuck at the bottom of the American job market until more Americans learn how the legacy of white supremacy and normal functioning of our economy deny African Americans equal access to opportunity. Only then will we come together to reform our economic institutions to provide a fair shot for all.
Unfortunately, during this historic week, we have also been given abundant evidence that we are nowhere close on either count.
On Wednesday, Governor Abbott signed legislation that outright forbids the teaching of our racist past and how it informs our present.
And just three weeks ago Texas House Democrats narrowly blocked passage of a Republican bill that would have curtailed voting rights and made it easier for judges to overturn election results.
158 years after slavery was legally ended in Texas, and 156 years after we found out about it, Republican legislators want us to believe that racism doesn’t hinder access to the American dream, that expanding democracy somehow hurts white people.
Rather than trying to win elections by delivering for the American people, the faction in control of the Republican Party is launching full-scale campaigns to whip up racial resentment, limit access to the ballot box, and make it easier to overturn elections they lose.
On this Juneteenth, Texas is ground zero in the fight for American democracy. And only by engaging in an honest reckoning with our past can we win that fight and open the door to a new era of racial justice.
Hany Khalil taught social studies at Houston Independent School District high schools for nine years before becoming Executive Director of the Texas Gulf Coast Area Labor Federation, AFL-CIO. He is a Vice-President of the Houston Federation of Teachers.
