One hundred and three years ago, a mob of white people looted, bombed and burned Black Wall Street, also known as the Greenwood District, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Hundreds of Black community members were slaughtered or wounded and their homes and businesses destroyed. To this day, no one has been held accountable for those atrocities.
Recently, the Oklahoma State Supreme court denied three survivors — who were all at least 100 years old — the opportunity to pursue damages in court for the 1921 Tulsa Massacre. Compare and contrast this with the survivors of the 1996 Oklahoma City Bombing, who had millions allocated into a private fund to assist them for being victims of terrorism and mass violence. Are the survivors of the Tulsa Massacre not also survivors of terrorism and mass violence? So why the difference in treatment? (You know the answer: anti-Black racism.)
There is a massive racial wealth gap in the U.S. that can be directly correlated with the labor and capital stolen during chattel slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow and redlining. These racist economic, land and labor policies not only steal Black wealth but also effectively impede the ability of Black communities to collectively and individually accrue any wealth and/or land.
Black families are less likely to own homes than white families at every income level, and, as we all know, rent payments do not accrue wealth for the tenant. In 2022, 67% of white families earning more than $100,000 to $150,000 owned homes in King County, compared to 48% of Black families, according to data from the Civil Rights and Labor History Consortium. Even when people of color do own homes, their homes tend to appreciate less than white people’s. A study conducted by ECONorthwest found the impacts of wealth lost through lack of homeownership and lower home value appreciation has resulted in Black households in King County having an estimated $5.4 billion to $15.8 billion in cumulative intergenerational wealth loss.
Still, this can’t be all about the money. The racial wealth gap shows the racist, inequitable outcomes of our current system, but that doesn’t mean we should just simply assimilate and become Black capitalists in order to get the damages we are owed. The reality is that the entire U.S. system is built on the extraction of labor and the stealing of land, and if we are to truly set things right — if we are truly in the pursuit of justice — we can no longer operate on business as usual.
But sure, we now have a federally recognized holiday where all who are lucky enough to be afforded paid time off can celebrate the day the last enslaved Africans in the U.S. found out they were legally free from chattel slavery. Of course, this discovery came with the caveat that these enslaved Africans were still lacking the rights and protections of their white counterparts and former slave masters. This year, the hundred-plus-year-old victims of the Tulsa Massacre are still actively being denied the right to seek damages for harms caused at the hands of white racists, including government officials. But we should be happy the U.S. recognizes Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day, as a federal holiday, right?
What good is this federal holiday if the federal government still fails to acknowledge and account for the atrocities it has allowed and committed both past and present?
Juneteenth was originally known as “Jubilee Day.” Jubilee in this context is purposefully biblical and refers to the promise made in Leviticus chapter 25 to free all slaves (and incarcerated peoples), erase all debt and return land to its original and divine authority. In this way, the freedom of Black peoples, and all oppressed peoples, is inextricably connected to the Land.
From Washington to Palestine to the Congo and Sudan, the struggles of Black peoples for liberation and freedom are deeply woven with the struggles and liberation of other Indigenous peoples. After all, Black Americans as a part of the African diaspora are also indigenous to the Land — to the Motherland, to the Continent, to Africa. Capitalism and extractive systems have made our relationship to the Land only about what we can take and accrue from it, rather than what we can give and protect so that we grow with it. While land acquisition and homeownership may seem like an easy fix to the racial wealth gap, June-
teenth invites us to go deeper. Freedom Day invites us to imagine the possibilities of a liberated future, which also includes the Land and the Peoples of those lands.
If we are serious about celebrating Juneteenth, regardless of whether the government ever does the just thing, non-Black folks who have benefited from racial inequalities and racist policies in the U.S., especially white folks, will need to redistribute resources to Black communities and return land back to Indigenous communities. They will have to work in concert with the most oppressed peoples to transform our policies and economic systems to be reflective of the accountability, healing and collective care for which Jubilee calls.
But until we, the People, can commit ourselves to doing the work of racial, economic and climate justice, the federal recognition of Juneteenth is just Grade A gaslighting from the Feds.
#FreeThemAll #LandBack #AbolitionNow
Read more of the June 19–25, 2024 issue.