This essay focuses on enduring hope of an oppressed people. killing. But it did watch his funeral(Links to an external site.).
This is liberation?
Just weeks ago, a quarantined nation watched a Black man, George Floyd, slowly die under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer and the indifferent gaze of his colleagues. For hundreds of years, America has not cared to change the racist system that resulted in Floyd’s killing. But it did watch his funeral(Links to an external site.).
This is liberation?
Since 1865, Black people have been gaslighted. America has gripped our chains and, in a cruel sleight of hand, pretended its fists were empty. Black freedom is, in the words of Harlem Renaissance writer Ralph Ellison, a “gaudy illusion.” Juneteenth is more illustrative of the enduring hope of an oppressed people than an observance of Black emancipation.
My father recalls of Black life in the Jim Crow South, “We didn’t give a lot of thought to the fact that we were not free; we just knew that we were not.” African Americans still know this. So we scream, march, demand and hope.
Over recent weeks, corporations and media conglomerates have admitted their complicity in systemic racism. The country is reconsidering policing, an institution that grew in the South(Links to an external site.) from a desire to protect the slave system and human chattel. Monuments to Confederates and racists are coming down. And American streets are teeming with protesters chanting, “Black Lives Matter.”