America Doesn't Deserve Juneteenth

feelings about Juneteenth being celebrated. I have feelings about how Juneteenth is being co opted and commodified, and that especially at a time when we have an entire cult republican radicalized domestic terrorist party working over time to ensure that nothing that is taught in K three twelve education has even a hint of perspective outside of white supremacy and patriarchy.

And that I believe that the Juneteenth holiday came about as a pacifier right to all of the other things that black people in this country have been asking for four centuries. Right When I think about Juneteenth, when I think about the way in which Juneteenth has been talked about and the backlash that has been received, and it

pisses me off. It pisses me off. Juneteenth is a celebration of freedom and liberation, but it is also a reminder a deep reminder of the insidious nature of white supremacy. Yeah slighting lies, economic extraction, abuse of black people. Juneteenth came about because it would be two years following the end of the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation that enslaved Africans in Galveston, Texas would learn that they were

now free. I'm certain that the white, vicious terrorists that were owning human beings knew that they were to be freed, but decided that they hadn't gotten enough free labor, They hadn't caused enough trauma, abuse, harm, violence, right, just needed

two more years. This country makes me sick because every time that people are forced into the streets to declare the relevance of their own lives, that our lives actually matter, and that no lives, all lives can't matter until black lives actually matter, that we are still saying the same things that our ancestors said, still fighting for the same things that white, lying ass politicians and this lying ass federal government, regardless of which party is in charge, have

denied Black people their full humanity. Because here's the thing. Juneteenth became a federal holiday following the racial uprisings of twenty twenty when we all watch collectively George Floyd take his last breath at the hands of the murdering X cop Derek Chauvin. For close to nine minutes, we watched a black man killed like a dog in the fucking street.

Then we waited with bated breath through a trial to see if maybe this time someone is going to be held accountable for what the world witnessed in fucking Hora. We asked for a police reform, We asked for an end to qualified immunity. We asked for accountability of this state funded, fucking mob to be able to be charged and held criminally responsible for the damage and harm and

death and destruction they cause. Eight months into bullshit negotiations between Senate Democrats and Senate Republicans, they come out, throw up their hands and say, oh, we couldn't come to an agreement, so we'll just continue with the status quo, which is that black lives don't actually matter and never have. They're only useful as tools to our ends, but outside

of that, you're deserving of nothing. So then they turn around and they say, oh, well, here's Juneteenth off for everybody, including the white fucking racist, including the ancestors of those that kept us in shackles, that tortured, raped, sold our children, and then turn around and want to say that, oh, black people don't know anything about family, a nuclear family. Give me a break. How do you make a federal holiday and then don't create any curriculum around that holiday?

Juneteenth was only celebrated in a handful of places, Texas, Washington, DC, where I used to live, being one of them, two of them. I hadn't heard about Juneteenth until I moved

to the Washington DC DMV area for college. Can you imagine the amount and the lengths that this white supremist country has gone to to hide their abuses, to hide their terrorism, to distort reality, to paint this picture of white exceptionalism, knowing that there is nothing exceptional about whiteness outside of the exceptional way with which they reeled brutality

and harm. So then as people are forced out into the streets out a hide of a pandemic before we have vaccines, before we even really know what we are dealing at with. Oh, the federal government says we're gonna make Juneteenth a federal holiday that'll show black people we care about them. I don't need your fucking holidays that everybody gets off and doesn't know dick about. I don't need Maya Angelou's face embassiled on a coin. I don't even need Harriet Tubman on a twenty dollar bill that

we will never see. What I need is equity. What I need is justice. What I actually need and wants fucking reparations, not Juneteenth ice cream or T shirts, just another way to capitalize on the money that black people put out into our economy to support it. We spend more money than most other communities and get nothing back from these very same corporations that want to now turn

their websites from half Rainbow to half kenttie cloth. And that's supposed to be showing some type of allyship and solidarity. Miss me with it. So as I'm seeing people from Nike to Walmart giving employees a day off or saying, oh, we're going to do a day of service, or let us give some wayward black community a couple of thousand dollars, patting themselves on the back for fucking what. The amount that black people are owed in this country is obscene.

We have had HR forty introduced every year, and I want to pull it up for you because people don't know this. Why because it's never happened. It's never, ever, ever, ever happened. HR forty has been introduced multiple multiple times. The bill seeks to establish the Commission to Study and

develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans. The Commission shall examine slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from sixteen nineteen to the present and recommend appropriate remedies. It's never passed, it's never passed. We've had no such commission, We've had no such investigation. We haven't even had so much as a fucking apology, really, right, a recognition of

harm that has been done. Folks will say, oh, but you know, don't you remember when the House, you know, under Nancy Pelosi said that they were sorry about slavery, and then was that when they put the kenty cloth around them and all got down on one knee. I tell you that what makes me sick, so sick about America is we don't want to do anything. We don't want change, not America as a whole, and certainly not white America. And I'm going to say it as a whole.

I'm not part in parceling. So if I'm not talking about you, then I'm not talking about you. But you see, things get done in this country when White America demands it. So if there are so many good, thoughtful, caring, empathetic allies, then where are their voices around demanding reparations for the Black community, for a community that has faced so much.

It's amazing. You want to talk about excellence. Every day I find myself in awe of Black people in this country and all of the fact that given every single obstacle, whether it be through education, incarceration, our death rates being higher than everybody else, gun violence, police brutality, right, food deserts, our healthcare system that has killed so many, including one in three Black women that go to deliver babies. Oh, when I think, folks about all of these things, it's

amazing to me. The success is that we've had the people that have been produced through this community. You want to talk about resiliency, and yet we're still being forced into the streets to demand acknowledgement that oh, we're killed at an alarming rate by the police state, and then we can't even hold those same police accountable that the most that they get is what administrative lead that is

fucking paid for by our own dollars. Indisputable with Doctor Rashid Ricci is one of the latest shows on the TYT network and also the fastest growing news show in America. On his show, Doctor Ricci plays no games regarding policy, delivering a heavy dose of fact based truth and penetrating analysis on all the top news stories focusing on racism, criminal and social justice, politics, police brutality, parents, and much more.

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change and more. Tune in every Tuesday wherever you get your podcasts that books are being banned that are written by black authors because God forbid, we tell the truth, because it will make According to Ron deck Santis in Florida, white people uncomfortable. White people should be uncomfortable, should absolutely

be uncomfortable. You know what's uncomfortable walking around in a black body in this country and not knowing how you are going to be received, knowing that by virtue of being in this body, and don't let me add in the other layers of being queer. Right, black trans women are murdered at a rate well above the national average

of murder rates. That you can't shop in a grocery store, you can't play on a playground, you can't sleep in your own bed, you can't walk to the corner store, you can't shop for a legal gun without the fear of violence descending upon you. And then guess what your family after your death, having no recourse, getting no justice, getting absolutely fucking nothing but more pain so that we can all have press conferences to talk about this will never happen again, just in time for it to guess

what happening again. It is exhausting living in a country and supposedly being told that you are not a patriot because you stand up to a country that has decided that you are worth nothing. If you are not laboring for free, for the system and just being thankful for being allowed to exist outside of shackles, then somehow you are the problem. I'm the racist because I acknowledge the fact that racism is embedded in every Fabrican, in every

system of this country. But you want me to jump up and celebrate Juneteenth being named a federal holiday in a country that has killed so many of us. And just recently acknowledges the fact that the Tulsa massacre that happened over a hundred years ago wiped out an entire town of people. Bombs those people never received, or operations. Those people never received anything other than a mass fucking grave. So you should be applauded for acknowledging that. You should

be applauded for the fact that we know. Why has cancer research and other research been able to happen. Oh, because the healthcare system stole cells from a black woman, Henriette A. Lacks made multi billions off of it while her family lived in poverty, not knowing that she had been stolen from that she had no bodily autonomy, that her cells, her body, her pieces had been commodified. We only learned about that through a book and research that

was done. Still, her family has received nothing. But I'm supposed to be happy with a holiday. I've been talking for a long time about really considering leaving this country. In the next couple of years. My sister is returning to the States after twelve years of living abroad, and now that she's returning, we are actually wondering if it's even safe for us to exist in this country. And it isn't. We know that. But how do you flee everything that you know? And where do you go that

is safe? Because black people are not safe anywhere. Anti blackness is prevalent everywhere. So what does it mean to occupy a body that you have no escape from? And everyone is made a target? But please pass me some of that Walmart Juneteenth ice cream. I'm sure that will make me feel better. I'm going to preview a piece that by the time that this airs will be running on The Daily Beast that I wrote because I was asked to write about my feelings around Juneteenth, and I said,

my feelings are actually quite layered. I have more anger than I do anything else because just like everything that black people had that was ours, it now becomes everyone else's.

Now you have CNN doing a global Juneteenth holiday. Juneteenth is about the abuse of Black people and their liberation in this country, being liberated from white supremacy, only right to be left out of one shackles in order to be put into another one under Jim Crow, to just birth generations into poverty, into under education, all because they did the hard labor to build this country, only to have its spit in its face. So for me, America

doesn't deserve Juneteenth. It doesn't deserve the day off. What it deserves is the hard labor and the hard fucking truth that my ancestors had to live through. And thank God for their perseverance under such unbelievable terrorism and durest

because otherwise I wouldn't be here. It's why I love the T shirt that says, I am my ancestors wildish dreams because you see those black people that you see walking around and living where the products of the enslaved Africans that you couldn't kill, that this country could kill, but tries to kill us every day. America. Honestly, these days makes me feel ill, even as I went recently to the White House and still this place that was built again for free by my ancestors, still fills me

with some type of hope. But I don't know what's smaller than a mustard seed, But that is how I feel. This is the piece that is in the Daily Beast right now that I will share with all of you as you reflect on Juneteenth, and you know, I want to hear from all of you, all people that listen to Woke a f Do you believe that Juneteenth should

have been named a federal holiday? Is there something else that could have been done, Let's say, maybe passing HR forty and kicking it up to the Senate and having that being signed by the President of the United States to actually honor what was stolen, the lives that were stolen, and figure out how to restore the generational damage that

has been done. What does it say about this country that, even when we have Democrats that are in power, that this isn't something that they could imagine to get done. It's not a priority skip Corporate Juneteenth branding invest in black people. June nineteenth, eighteen sixty five is a date in our nation's history that all Americans should know, but haven't until recently. It was the day that the last enslaved African Americans were notified about their emancipation following the

end of the Civil War. The kicker, it came two whole years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. That's two years have continued abuse and torture at the hands of white slave owners who knew of the emancipation but kept their scheme going until the news reached Galveston, Texas. So how does this occasion call for Juneteenth ice cream and T shirts modeled by white women make sense to

corporate America. Juneteenth became a national holiday in twenty twenty one following the racial uprisings of twenty twenty that was sparked by the brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in the midst of the COVID nineteenth pandemic that the world was still trying to understand. Thousands of Black Americans and allies took

to the streets demanding justice and police accountability. What did we receive instead, a national holiday and a failed attempt at police reform legislation. That's the thing about America. This country would rather provide a holiday in a Maya Angelou embazzled coin than voting rights, police reform, economic investment, and K through twelve education taught outside of the lens of whiteness.

The Juneteenth Federal Holiday was announced at the very same time Republicans were escalating their crusade against critical race theory. It was the most American move yet, creating a federal holiday but not designing a curriculum that teaches what that holiday means, all because of the radical rights war against

consciousness otherwise known as wokeness. As with any holiday in the United States, what follows is the mass commercialization by corporate America, squeezing any real sentiment or understanding dry in order to increase their bottom line. What does it mean for corporations to commodify the Juneteenth Holiday extracting once again from a community they choose not to invest in. It means taking our money in one hand and supporting candidates that vote against our access and equity in the other.

The real bottom line, corporate America needs to find more meaningful ways to honor this sacred holiday than selling ice cream wrapped in Kente cloth and African colors. What the Black community has always needed is the resources that were beautially extracted from our ancestors with their free labor, which built this nation. We need our neighborhood, schools and businesses to be reinvested in, not as charity, but as reparations

for the generational trauma and damage inflicted upon us. This, however, is the conversation that American doesn't want to have, because doing so would force a level of accountability that White America would prefer and not reckon with. Let alone, actually acknowledge corporations can and should play a vital role in the restoration of the Black community and other marginalized commun unities, instead of lining the pockets of their CEOs, whose pay

has reached record levels. As the rest of US struggle with the effects of inflation and supply chain disruptions, corporations could instead invest in historically black colleges and universities, creating a pipeline for the next generation of C suite executives. Corporations like Walmart could put their money where their branding is and contribute to underserved communities like the one in Buffalo, whose Soule grocery store in the black community became a

scene of a vicious white supremacist hate crime. Why was Top's Grocery such an important hub in the Buffalo community because for decades it had been outright ignored by both politicians and corporations. There are way too many communities like Buffalo where the largely black communities have a dearth of grocery stores, community centers, banks, and tree lined streets with regular sanitation pickup. Instead, they're dotted with predatory lenders and

liquor stores. This hasn't happened by accident, nor is it a moral failing of black people. It's a product of racist redlining and disinvestment. But this doesn't have to be our curse forever. If Corporate America wants to celebrate Juneteenth, the honor the legacy of enslaved Africans that built this country, those companies need to shift their thinking from one of

extraction to investment. What would it look like to make public commitments to diversifying their workforce from the assembly lines to the C suites. What would it look like for more companies to do what Sapphora did and devote physical space in their stores for black owned health and beauty lines. There are a myriad of ways that corporate America can engage with Juneteenth. That isn't about commodification, but it means

making a promise and actually delivering. This piece is live right now at the Daily Beast, so I encourage you all to check it out and share it widely. Share it with your friends, share it with your family, share it on social media. Because this is the truth. It is not enough to acknowledge something, to acknowledge pain just for a holiday, just as a pacifier for real, actual work that needs to be done. And it's not Black people's job to do it, because we didn't create racism

and the slave trade to begin with. We're only the ones that have to deal with the residual effects of it. When will it end? When white people have decided that true ally ship isn't just about marching alongside. It is actually about continually speaking out and organizing on behalf of those who have been wronged and continue to be historically wronged in this country. We don't all deserve Juneteenth an

America sure as fuck does not. Get a behind the scenes look at Comedy Central's The Daily Show Beyond the Scenes, an original podcast from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Every week, host Roy Wood Junior goes deeper with the notable guests and experts from the Emmy Award winning series. Together, they use comedy to tackle current topics from gentrification to gun laws and take a closer look at how and

why these topics matter. Listen to Beyond the Scenes from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. New episodes every Tuesday. That is it for me today. Folks on Woke app as always, Power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck. Get a behind the scenes look at Comedy Central's The Daily Show on Beyond the Scenes, an original podcast from

the Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Every week, host Roy Wood Junior goes deeper with the notable guests and experts from the Emmy Award winning series. Together, they use comedy to tackle current topics from gentrification to gun and take a closer look at how and why these topics matter. Listen to Beyond the Scenes from the Daily Show with Trevor Noah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. New episodes every Tuesday.