As We Celebrate Juneteenth, We’re Still Trying To Get Free

Stephanie Siek
ZORA
Published in
5 min readJun 18, 2021

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True to its origins, this year’s Juneteenth combines incremental victory and continued struggle.

A woman wipes away tears after the names of Black people killed by police were read while marching to mark the Juneteenth holiday June 19, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Juneteenth is now an official federal holiday, with legislation creating “Juneteenth National Independence Day” having passed in the House and Senate and signed into law by President Joe Biden. This victory is hard-won, the fruit of decades of activism from people like 94-year-old Opal Lee, who once walked from Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C., (at 89!) to push for federal recognition.

So finally, the U.S. is getting a national holiday dedicated to the emancipation of our enslaved ancestors. But it’s happening amid a concerted right-wing effort to control whether schoolchildren get to learn about the inconvenient truths of slavery or the continuing fight for full equity and equality. Of what benefit is a federal Juneteenth holiday if the history behind its origins is suppressed? And what happens when a celebration created by and for formerly enslaved people and their descendants passes into the mainstream?

This Juneteenth, we are celebrating the freedom our ancestors fought and died for while a group of would-be slavery apologists tries to convince the country that our ancestors were unreliable narrators of their own suffering.

If people, particularly non-Black people, fail to fully understand the origins of the holiday, letting it become just another day off on the calendar, we’re in trouble.

School districts, municipalities and states across the country are facing bans on the teaching of what the right claims is critical race theory. Critical race theory is not a curriculum, it’s actually a very specific legal and academic framework for interrogating the ways white supremacy and racism continue to hold back marginalized groups, including Black people, in society. As civil rights attorney Janel George explains: “CRT recognizes that racism is not a bygone relic of the past. Instead, it acknowledges that the legacy of slavery, segregation, and the imposition of second-class citizenship on Black Americans and other people of color continue to permeate the social fabric of this nation.”

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Stephanie Siek
ZORA
Writer for

Stephanie Siek is a writer and editor who loves cats, cookie dough and aborted alliteration.