It is my hope that on Juneteenth
all Black Americans might be
able to take some time
to celebrate the significance of the day.
That they might be able to tap into the overwhelming sense of pure joy and absolute liberty
that the enslaved people in Texas
must have felt at the very moment
when they finally heard the news of their long awaited freedom from captivity.

And it is my hope that white Americans
might be able to take some time to imagine how that hope might have felt,
and that they might continue to educate themselves
by studying the un-sanitized versions of American history,
and reading the written accounts of black brown and indigenous peoples,
learning about the systems of enslavement, and oppression that existed before,
and that followed after that Freedom Day.
Realizing that although freedom
may have been ceremoniously declared and decreed,
it was only doled out in dribs and drabs, until the 13th amendment
was added to the declaration
and freedom was granted to all slaves,
but not to convicts.
After the emancipation proclamation,
when slaves became free,
slave patrols became police,
and prisons became the new plantations.
And to understand that
the fleeting feeling of freedom
was soon after followed
by period of destruction,
and shoddy Reconstruction.
Jim Crow laws and gerrymandering.
Blockbusting, blacklisting and voter suppression,
even the GI Bill was no concession.
And how Black freedom and justice is still dribbing and drabbing
and that justice for all is not yet, for all.

It is my hope that all Americans might continue to do the necessary work to dismantle the systems that continue to subjugate, segregate and separate us
so that we might all come together,
like the fantasy of the melting pot we were sold
in our still-segregated schools,
one big blended society,
Where all, each and every,
are treated equally because they,
each and every, are created equally
under the law under god
under the stars under the stripes.

And it is my hope that a true Freedom Day
comes sooner rather than much later,
when we finally stop viewing each other as other,
as more deserving or less deserving,
and to understand that
true freedom means
the equal pursuit of equal happiness
for every one of us, equally.