‘Juneteenth’ for black lib

The Biden administration’s decision to declare June 19 or ‘Juneteenth’ as a national holiday, on a par with Independence Day (July 4), Christmas, Veterans Day (November 11) and New Year’s Day is yet another hallmark of the unfinished socio-political agenda of American democracy.

The recent years have made no secret of the fact that the US is a divided society. There are large segments of the population who are denied equal political and social rights and exist as an economic underclass, minus educational or financial equity. A strong current of US political opinion has been able to prevent through legal, monetary and social means, the fulfilment of America’s own vision, put out in its Declaration of Independence in 1776, that ‘all men are created equal.’

Juneteenth commemorates the emancipation of Black Americans, most of who were slaves in the US till the middle of the 19th century. The Emancipation Proclamation, signed by President Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the Civil War (1860-1865), had declared all slaves free as of January 1, 1863. But it was only when the victorious Union Army reached Galveston that some 2.5 lakh black slaves in Texas learnt they were free through an order issued by Union General Gordon Granger on June 19, 1865.

For the record, black Americans had arrived in the US at the same time as the whites in the 1620s, only they had come as captured slaves shipped across the Atlantic to labour in the American colonies.

Thereafter, black Americans celebrated this date as their independence day, because July 4, the traditional American independence day, had meant little to them. The deep divide that these two dates represent continues to this dayIt took exactly one more century after Juneteenth to August 1965 when the blacks got the legal right to vote, some 15 years after all Indians did. This was a century of enormous suffering that saw a migration of freed slaves to ghettos in the northern cities. Blacks were barred in many places from buying property, permitted limited access to legal processes, prevented from voting and their children sent to segregated schools. Businesses did do well in black enclaves like Tulsa, Oklahoma and east St Louis, only to be destroyed by white mob violence. Thousands of blacks were lynched often for no cause — lynching was a means of controlling and dominating the blacks.

As the US rose to become the richest and most powerful country in the world, a substantial proportion of its citizens were socially and politically handicapped and denied the ability to generate equity as the whites were, in the form of property and savings or educational attainment comparable to the white community. Recall that fully 25 per cent of all Americans were black at the time of independence, most of them slaves. Today, they number 13 per centIt is difficult to sum up the historical injustice that black Americans suffered. Or the extent to which they helped to enrich America. The labour of black slaves in cotton plantations enabled the US to become an economic power in the 19th century. Since they were bought and sold in the market, it is possible to estimate that their value in 1860 was ‘three times greater than the total amount invested in (US) banks’. And it was seven times the total value of currency circulating in the US at the time.

Home ownership rates for black families are around 44 per cent compared to 74 for white families. A Washington Post analysis found that a typical middle class black household in 2016 had $13,000 in wealth, compared to the nearly $1,50,000 for the median white household, and that the gap had actually increased since 1968.The US has seen periods where it has overcome the divisions to meet enormous challenges — World War II was one of them, as was the competition with the Soviet Union. Sending a man to the moon was a huge scientific exercise, but it came in a political era that saw a slew of social security measures like healthcare for poorer and older Americans, reforms in education, rural education, the environment, public broadcasting, transportation and it was not surprising that it also provided the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to bring blacks into the political mainstream.

But now, as the American demographic profile becomes less white, we see a last-ditch stand of the conservatives. They detest where America is right now and are afraid where it is headed. Across the country, right-wing politicians are passing laws to restrict voting by the poorer and less educated black community.

The principal competitor of the US, China, simply wiped out its social divisions by executing several million people at the time when the People’s Republic was founded and in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Homogeneity is something that is intrinsic to the Hans who have a history of assimilating diverse peoples and cultures. You can see the effort being made now to do so in Xinjiang and Tibet and the turmoil makes China that much weaker.

In President Biden’s recent European tour, the central message was that of competition with China and the virtues of democracy over autocracy. Yet, Biden knows that the root of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, and the refusal of large numbers of the opposition to acknowledge him President, is racism, which not only weakens him, but the country and all its institutions.

For countries like India, who are relying on a strong US to meet their own geopolitical goals, this is not good news.

The Tribune June 22, 2021

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