If you are working today, you are not a corporate drone. Corporations jumped on the Juneteenth national holiday and have implemented it into their corporate holiday schedules. Smaller employers do not care, and our service sector still has to work for everyone else. The laptop, email class though, they get the day off. America now celebrates the emancipation of slaves, which is tied to a Texas quasi-holiday. We often hear about four hundred years of slavery, which if the Civil War did in fact happen, does not make sense in America. This is to make Americans believe slavery is a contemporary issue similar to the 2008 celebrity filled campaign ad that said ‘end slavery’ multiple times when it was about human trafficking. There has to be something to celebrate.

Economically, there’s nothing to celebrate. Blacks still have the highest rate of poverty at nearly 1 in 5. Black household income has stagnated since the Clinton era peak in the late ’90s. Black homeownership is at generational lows. It’s beyond a generation as the value is the lowest since the metric was first tracked in 1970. Black household wealth showed promising growth exiting the crack wars era, but was wrecked by the housing bubble popping, and is still under the ’00s peak. It is a bleak picture.

Per the official ideology, the cause of all of this is systemic white supremacy. That system has not slowed down Indian-Americans from becoming the highest earning ethnicity within the US, nor has it stopped other non-whites from earning more than blacks or in some instances, more than whites. True causes lie in the social and cultural realm. The biggest factor is the abysmal rates of marriage in the black community, which leave many black households led by one adult. Some pundits will cite this, but they are on the right. Out of wedlock births skyrocketed after the Great Society began and have bounced between 70-77% ever since. This is another social problem that destroys any chance at economic parity. Some pundits on the right will cite the post-1965 immigration as destroying the black working class and a path to middle class life, while they also conveniently avoid education and intelligence issues that keep many blacks frozen out of the growth in the laptop, email class of jobs.

This is why the discussion of equality pivoted to equity. President Obama won in 2008, and all that blacks got was a fantastic election night filled with tears of joy. What more was there to achieve for equality than occupying the big seat? At the end of fifty years of civil rights work, America elected a part black president, but every single metric I cited here was just as awful in 2008. There are no fixes. Even if we could try something outside the box, it would be immediately branded racist and placed outside the bounds of polite discussion.

Equity gets to the extraction core of the black political platform. Affirmative action policies made carve outs to grease a slide for a portion of blacks to attain middle or upper class economic status, but this is not long term fixes that are inter-generational. Equity is just strip-mining taxpayers, preferably whites only, to maintain a comfortable level of black consumption and provide an emotional boost with some financial revenge. It’s easy to see as now even reparations advocates discuss not a one time chunk of change but a continuous redistribution of income. That’s it. That’s the plan.

There really are no fixes because even with intense financial regulations such as the CRA, it’s never enough. Banks were punished for red-lining so they were forced to loan in specific areas. Red lines marked poor performing loan areas, and were under tougher scrutiny, yet some 1970s studies showed this was not the case it was just the poor housing stock (the actual collateral). Banks have met CRA rules by lending plenty to gentrification homebuyers and immigrants into traditionally black neighborhoods. Congressmen have now made noise that the CRA needs to be amended to not have the anti-red-lining metrics focus on areas but the actual borrowers. This is quota borrowing. As progressives know nothing of risk and return, they will not understand that yes banks will make loans to blacks in those areas but at 13% or 15% 30 year mortgage rates. We all know how this will end. Loans will be foreclosed on, and then banks will be accused of predatory lending.

Juneteenth does not have much to celebrate, but maybe that’s the point. It’s a phony holiday that is a woke sop to a left wing voter bloc rather than any actual change to their material conditions. As Tariq Nasheed would say, “Show me the tangibles.” It’s a holiday where the imagery shared by blacks is of a black power fist, but what was emancipation? Black slaves did not revolt in 1860s Confederate states, setting off a massive war over slavery. They barely revolted in the antebellum South. What freed the slaves was a fanatical drive by northern abolitionists, the output of Northern mills staffed by laborers a shallow step above the slaves, and the lives of hundreds of thousands of white Union soldiers. That does not make for cool, woke statues. We learned in 2020 that even those Union statues must come down.

So have a Happy Juneteenth! Enjoy the day off if you have it and roll your eyes at the empty, fake progressive messaging.