Juneteenth Blood on Our Hands

This weekend I am on a road trip with my son driving up the east coast looking at colleges and visiting friends and family in DC, Philly and New York. On Juneteenth, when I drove from DC to Philadelphia after a harrowing 4 hour bumper to bumper ordeal, the exit into Philadelphia threw me into an abjectly poor neighborhood with broken down homes, beat up cars - no signs of hope, prosperity or even life. The entire two mile stretch was lined with tobacco and liquor shops as well as dilapidated convenience stores with the occasional pawn shop thrown in. There was not a single child playing on the streets or a healthy food store or a business that looked functional. And I don’t need to state the obvious but majority of the people I saw walking or driving around were African Americans.

My country of birth, India has a penchant for declaring national holidays to appease every religion, caste and creed instead of dealing with the fundamentals of inequality that plagues those minority groups.

The events in the last year may have forced the discussion on racism out in the open in the US, but driving through this neighborhood was a stark and vivid reminder that work on many of the fundamentals of structural inequality and systemic bias has barely begun.

So, what then is the purpose of commemorating Juneteenth other than an appeasement - to either brush it under the carpet or commemorate progress which does not exist ? The red drinks and food that we are expected to drink and eat on this day seem like a farce when we are so far from making emancipation from slavery a lived reality - and symbolic in a macabre way when we still have blood on our hands … Sister Scene Creative Justice Community