Emancipation Is Not Freedom
A year ago today, author Ta-Nehisi Coates and others testified on Capitol Hill at a House hearing on H.R. 40, a bill meant to establish merely a commission to study the possibility of granting reparations to African Americans as recompense for the work of their enslaved forebears. Coates, famously, had made a comprehensive case arguing for reparations in The Atlantic five years earlier. Without it, there is no bill nor any hearing, especially on Juneteenth.
Today, we celebrate African American emancipation from enslavement, the day in 1865 when word finally got around to enslaved black women, men, and children in Texas that President Abraham Lincoln’s Proclamation, more than two years earlier, had liberated them. (That December, the 13th Amendment’s ratification would all but abolish slavery, with an important loophole in our incarceration system.) They were the last to learn of this. When that word finally came, via General Orders, Number 3 in Galveston advising that there is now “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves,” the United States finally gave itself a chance to embrace its greatest possibilities.
Juneteenth is the closest thing there is to an honest Independence Day. Yet even today, in the midst of this global revolt against systemic racism and the violence that stems from it, I view this holiday somewhat mournfully. It marks a precise tipping point when America had a choice to go right and failed. Emancipation was not freedom, and it never has been.
“The end of the Civil War and the ratification of the 13th Amendment was a national acknowledgement that slavery was not the way,” said Phillip Atiba Goff, the co-founder and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity. “That took so much blood and so much treasure that the nation was too exhausted to stay focused on what you do to actually build freedom.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/juneteenth-emancipation-reparations-liberation-1017793/