Juneteenth
A hundred forty-five years ago today Union soldiers entered the city of Galveston Texas and announced that the war was over. That legal chattel slavery was ended in the United States.
Here in Texas it's been a day black people have celebrated ever since. President Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation a few years earlier but it took a war to enforce it. For the past thirty years it's been an official state holiday (though not one state offices actually close for so it could be a more official holiday than it is). The efforts of black people from Texas and Louisiana have, over the past few years, made Juneteenth more widely known outside the black community here. There's more work to do to help spread awareness of it.
Part of Juneteenth is a celebration of what's been accomplished and what freedoms have been gained. Another part of Juneteenth is a recognition of how much work still needs to be done -- a whole lot of it by white folk here in the US. We need to be aware of the legacy of institutional slavery, of institutional segregation, of the systemic inequities and bigotries and barriers to access that still exist and work to our benefit by harming others.
We need to know that even though slavery is illegal it has not disappeared in the US; it has gone underground and the kinds of people who are slaves has changed. To help reduce modern-day slavery and human trafficking we need to reform immigration law and policy, to make it easier and cheaper and less degrading to migrate to the US legally: many slaves in the US are migrants enslaved by the people who smuggled them into this country. We need to decriminalise drugs use and prostitution and merge them into the legal economy: many slaves in the US are kept in bondage with very credible threats of turning them over to an unsympathetic criminal justice and immigration enforcement system. We cannot just pass laws making slavery and human trafficking illegal; we have to change the environment which allows these horrors to flourish.
There's more. There's always more. The work won't be done until we are all free. Until all the barriers that keep people from accessing their social and political and economic environments come down. Until unearned privilege is done and opportunities are as equal as fallible humanity can make them.
Aperiodically Legible: Originally posted at http://kaninchen.dreamwidth.org/4581.html. Comment count:
Here in Texas it's been a day black people have celebrated ever since. President Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation a few years earlier but it took a war to enforce it. For the past thirty years it's been an official state holiday (though not one state offices actually close for so it could be a more official holiday than it is). The efforts of black people from Texas and Louisiana have, over the past few years, made Juneteenth more widely known outside the black community here. There's more work to do to help spread awareness of it.
Part of Juneteenth is a celebration of what's been accomplished and what freedoms have been gained. Another part of Juneteenth is a recognition of how much work still needs to be done -- a whole lot of it by white folk here in the US. We need to be aware of the legacy of institutional slavery, of institutional segregation, of the systemic inequities and bigotries and barriers to access that still exist and work to our benefit by harming others.
We need to know that even though slavery is illegal it has not disappeared in the US; it has gone underground and the kinds of people who are slaves has changed. To help reduce modern-day slavery and human trafficking we need to reform immigration law and policy, to make it easier and cheaper and less degrading to migrate to the US legally: many slaves in the US are migrants enslaved by the people who smuggled them into this country. We need to decriminalise drugs use and prostitution and merge them into the legal economy: many slaves in the US are kept in bondage with very credible threats of turning them over to an unsympathetic criminal justice and immigration enforcement system. We cannot just pass laws making slavery and human trafficking illegal; we have to change the environment which allows these horrors to flourish.
There's more. There's always more. The work won't be done until we are all free. Until all the barriers that keep people from accessing their social and political and economic environments come down. Until unearned privilege is done and opportunities are as equal as fallible humanity can make them.
Aperiodically Legible: Originally posted at http://kaninchen.dreamwidth.org/4581.html. Comment count: