Biden's Essence Mag op-ed: "Juneteenth: A Reminder Of Black America's Long-Fought Fight For Justice"
For those not familiar, Essence is the country's leading magazine for Black women.
Juneteenth is a day of profound weight and power—a holiday whose very existence tells us so much about the soul of America. It reminds us of just how vulnerable our nation is to being poisoned by systems and acts of inhumanity. And it reminds us, too, of our incredible capacity to heal, to hope, and to emerge from our darkest moments of cruelty into a better version of ourselves. The Psalms tell us that ‘Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.’ Juneteenth contains both the long, hard night—the two-and-a-half years those enslaved in Galveston, Texas, endured before learning of their emancipation—and the promise of the brighter morning to come.
There is no question that the night feels endless right now. The last words of George Floyd—I can’t breathe—have called our entire nation to reckon with the injustices we have allowed to fester. His death carries echoes of Breonna Taylor in Louisville and Atatiana Jefferson in Fort Worth—senselessly killed by officers in their own homes. It carries echoes of Ahmaud Arbery—lynched before our eyes while jogging on a Georgia road. It carries echoes of Rayshard Brooks—shot in the back by an officer on the eve of his eldest daughter’s eighth birthday party. It carries echoes of an unbearable litany of lives and dreams snuffed out before their time.
Their deaths call us to come face to face not only with overt acts of violence, but with subtler realities that strike at the dignity of Black Americans every day. Homes systematically undervalued in Black communities. Credit that is harder to access for Black entrepreneurs. Expectant Black mothers who are disbelieved when they share medical concerns with their doctors—contributing to Black women being two-and-a-half times as likely to die from pregnancy complications as white women. And today, in the grip of a devastating pandemic that has claimed more than 117,000 lives, persistent disparities in our health and economic systems have conspired once more to place the sprawling burden of the crisis disproportionately on the shoulders of Black families.
Black Americans carry this weight. But all Americans have the responsibility to act. I believe that the moral obligation of our time is to rebuild America in a way that finally delivers the full share of equality, opportunity, and dignity due to every American. And, achieving it starts by rooting out systemic racism from our laws, our policies, our institutions, and our hearts.
https://www.essence.com/feature/juneteenth-black-americas-fight-justice-joe-biden/
