If the United States really is Independence Day, today will be the closest this country has to an actual Independence Day. Its official name reflects that. June 10th, National Independence Day, is set out in a bill signed by President Biden two years before him to recognize a federal holiday.

But it would be a mistake to think of Juneteenth as a pure celebration of liberation. Like most victories over racism, there is also a story of resistance to change. Even in Galveston, Texas, where the federal government arrived on June 19, 1865, declaring that all enslaved people must now be freed, the mayor forced the newly freed people to released. back to work According to historian Elizabeth Hayes Turner, no compensation was given. By then, the white slave laborer had become so accustomed to ignoring the Emancipation Proclamation that he had been issued more than two years earlier that slavery was abolished after June 10th. The remaining.

It is best to understand exactly what we are celebrating: an end to the unpaid tortured labor of blacks to build white wealth. While I don’t hate anyone who spends their days off and enjoys cooking, I can’t help but think this holiday is underutilized as an opportunity to teach and learn about black labor history.

For many of us, it begins within our own families, with the stories of our ancestors who migrated north, east, and west after liberation. “The enslaved people told their children who they were,” says historian Blair LM Kelly, author of the new book Black Fork: The Roots of the Black Working Class. ‘ said. “They definitely understood their history, which means that our physical memory has a desire to communicate that history to both the highly educated and the general public.” .”

Here Kelly begins writing “Black Folk,” a groundbreaking chronicle of the post-Juneteenth generation of the black working class. “The story that opens in this book is one my mother always told me,” Kelly told me last week. This is the story of her great-grandfather, a Georgia sharecropper, who was defrauded of reparations by unscrupulous plantation owners. He took his family and headed north with Kelly’s maternal grandfather, who was only 14 at the time. This story, and others in her book, are eerily reminiscent of many immigrant stories I’ve heard or read, including those from my own family.

“You can’t tell the story of the working class without telling the story of immigration,” says Kelly, a prominent professor of Southern studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “The reason we had to fight is because we kept facing all this kind of corruption and evil over and over again.”

Black values ​​and black wealth have always been and should be contested since chattel slavery began here. This story didn’t start in Juneteenth, but it’s worth remembering that the liberation we celebrate today didn’t give black people the same fairness that they had in their hard-earned nation. I have.

We get messages constantly reminding us of this. Despite the recent rise in black unemployment, 5%, the lowest ever, The racist abuse black workers are subjected to in the workplace mirrors much of what our ancestors suffered.

Most obvious is the continuing and worsening wealth and wage gap between whites and the rest of the world.RAND Corporation reported in May The median black American household has about $24,000 in savings, investments, home equity, and other components of wealth. The median income for white households is about $189,000, a gap that has widened in recent decades. According to the Center for American Progress, these gaps working black women and their households, Whether you are single or have children.

Between Q2 2020, At a time when these inequalities were widening due to the COVID-19 pandemic, white Americans made up 60% of the US population and owned 84% of US household wealth (about $94 trillion). Black workers and their families held 4% of household wealth, or $4.6 trillion.

how long will it take to get rid of this A gap between rich and poor generations? about $3 trillion. (This is especially noteworthy as the Special Commission on Reparations is patiently waiting to present its report to Californians on July 1st.)

When looking at such injustices, the term “working class” too often centers around the plight of white people and ignores the large and often underpaid contribution of black workers to American society as a whole. It tells us that

“Black people are always the canaries in the coal mine,” Kelly said. “If you elevate blacks, you elevate working-class America.”

This is why I think the timing of Kelly’s book being published was a coincidence. Juneteenth acknowledges and honors the ongoing struggle. Much like Labor Day, it recognizes workers’ past successes and weaknesses, and the unfinished business left to ensure their fairness. As the movement to criminalize and erase black history intensifies, what better day to shine a spotlight on what black labor has endured and the arrears owed to their descendants.

“This is all a real event that happened in this country,” Kelly said. “And it doesn’t mean that everyone should be defeated or ashamed about the past, but it does mean that we need to understand the past and accept it as part of the American tapestry. So we fear the truth.” You shouldn’t.”