What are the other names of Juneteenth? The United States betrays the spirit of the “Jubilee”

This story was supported by the Economic Hardship Report Draft non-profit journalism.

Dating back millennia, the Jubilee was a momentous celebration, a year when the land was to be returned, debts canceled and enslaved people were to be set free. Announced by the strong breath of a ram’s horn, biblical notethe year of the Jubilee was anchored in the idea of ​​freedom, orchestrating an economic, cultural and moral dynamic. company reorganization. It is therefore normal that Juneteenth is often called Jubilee Day.

In January 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation abolished property slavery, to declare “all persons held in slavery” must be “free forever”. But it wasn’t until two years later, on June 19, 1865, that news of the liberation finally reached the slaves of Galveston, Texas. Juneteenth, sometimes called Black Independence Day or Freedom Day, honors this real end of slavery.

In a way, the Emancipation Proclamation functioned as the first and only Black American Jubilee—in fact, “Jubilee” is what once enslaved people. called the phase that followed the Civil War. Abolition put an end to an entire exploited labor economy that builds the modern capitalist world. But the Emancipation Proclamation went further than requiring the Confederate States to simply recognize the abolition of slavery – it educated the United States government to “maintain” the freedom of formerly enslaved people and to do “no act or deed to suppress such people” or any “effort they might make for their actual freedom”. Today, contrary to the instructions of President Abraham Lincoln, the government still sanctions and facilitates the oppression of black people.

Sharecropping, convict tenancy, medical racism, mass incarceration, policing and other racist institutions have trapped black Americans in cycles of debt bondage, indentured servitude and suffering. Forced to debt-finance public goods and their own incarceration, black people bear the brunt of students, medical, and criminal legal debt. For-profit colleges, hospitals, police departments and the prison industrial complex are all (literally) betting on their schemes to put black communities in debt. Just ten years ago, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, racist housing practices and job losses erased more than half black wealth.

As a result, the current gap between blacks and whites in home ownership is wider than over 50 years ago. From the Three-Fifths Compromise to jail and racial gerrymandering, politicians have repeatedly dismantled black political power, returning the right to vote weaker for black Americans than they were in 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was first passed. The scourge of gun violence and the school-to-jail pipeline have stolen the future of black children. black girls are vanish at an unreasonable rate and black trans women have a life expectancy around the age required to be president: 35 years. If you’re black, your risk of incarceration increases almost quintupled. If you’re a black woman in New York, your likelihood of dying in childbirth increases eightfold. Unfortunately, black Americans represent 13% of the American population and 40% of the inhabitants of death corridor.