Say what you want about Juneteenth, either it is just so much ado about getting news after-the-fact, or another opportunity to raise national – no, international – awareness to the plight of the Black enslaved people in the United States of America.

Yes, it is a federal holiday that was officially recognized in 2021 by then President Joe Biden but had been celebrated in Texas and parts of Louisiana since 1865, when the enslaved living there finally heard that the Civil War ended, the south lost, and they had been"freed" in 1862 by a proclamation.

Skeptics of the value of the holiday question what actual benefit was earned by those still enslaved. There were no reparations paid for their illegal labor. In fact, even the previously emancipated had not received any reparations.

Still awaiting my share of 40 acres and a mule.

Why delay the Emancipation Proclamation?

Enslaved (free) labor was needed to keep bringing in the rich crops long after the war ended. We are constantly reminded of how valuable farm workers are to this country. You see how quickly Trump reversed his draconian immigration policy and pledged to exempt those “valuable” workers from immediate deportation.

American laws, policies and the fabric of the country’s character has always been about the economy. Initially agrarian based, it is easy to follow American profits earned from trade in futures, technology, and international exchanges.

Government leaders are driven by a bottom line as much as business titans and entrepreneurs who fund their campaigns. A cursory examination of public policies illustrates how current practices are designed to earn profits from the bottom rung of society all the way to the corporate workplace.

This country’s history has clearly demonstrated that little else matters in America except generating profit. That reality was drawn in stark detail last week when a report was issued about the growth in wealth of Donald Trump and his family in the past five months.

Gold Trump telephone?

But what has this to do with Juneteenth?

For generations, we have remained traumatized by that long, inhumane and soul-stealing enterprise of capital ism – upon which our backs and our bodies were built, and from under which we were never given real free dom – to become independent of that system of exploitation.

American capitalism has succeeded in keeping us tethered to the model of labor and production which enriches a few owners. Black ownership is sparse.

As a Black nation within a nation, our spending power is estimated at $1.98 trillion in 2025. Yet, our wealth is not generational. We are consumers, not owners.

Despite the fact that we have been free since 1862 and 1865, Black folk in America hold less wealth than some ethnic groups who recently immigrated: 2023 median household income for Blacks was more than $56K.

By comparison, in 2023, the median household income for Indian/Asians exceeded $145K, for whites $89K, for Nigerians $80K, for Hispanics $65K!

While we are celebrating symbolic freedoms issued on paper, we have not effectively lived as a unified group since we were removed from the slave ships.

Even when we tried, nascent Black independent movements and/or their leaders suffered premature deaths, or were killed, e.g., Marcus Garvey, the Black Panthers, BAM, Freedom marchers, SNCC, Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, Fred Hampton, to name a few.

Yet, we continue to laud our rights to access the American way of life. We were offered and we gleefully accepted integration, assimilation, and other banal forms of social status with puny offerings of opportunity, table scraps of democracy, a handful of civil rights acts, some affirmative actions, DEI, and more.

But it has never been enough or near what a reparations package should look like; last estimated at $640 billion in land value alone. Imagine how much leverage that could "buy." Now that would be a call for real celebration We already have a cadre of trained, educated, motivated and nation-building folk who can design an infrastructure to develop a powerful economic force to benefit the Black nation within this nation, if only we can get over internal divisions within our community.

Some of these divisions are left over from the period of enslavement. Some self-imposed. In order to align ourselves with the master we have adopted their ways, their looks, their speech patterns, and more.

We have literally “forgotten” how to coalesce around our universal yearning to be free, a strategy of survival adopted by our enslaved ancestors.

I issue a word of caution in celebrating Juneteenth. Don’t let it be used as another distraction from the bottom-line agenda that Black folk need to keep in focus; we cannot afford to be late to any more parties. Toniwg1@gmail.com