On Balance | Juneteenth is welcome, but the US needs an Election Day holiday to fight inequality

Let’s put cynicism aside and appreciate that the US government made the change only within a year of the wave of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa demonstrations that rumbled through major cities and small towns during the pandemic. 

When news began circulating about the proposal to make Juneteenth – June 19 – a federal holiday, it seemed as though Americans were in for another cycle of this unrest. At the least, they might need to endure the barrage of dog-whistle racist rhetoric of those politicians and pundits aligned with the Trump regime. 

Many conservative politicians, after all, pulled out the stops to support far-right protesters. Former president Donald Trump himself suggested that Kyle Rittenhouse – a teenager facing murder charges after opening fire on BLM protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, with an AR-15-style rifle – was acting in self-defence, leading the charge of Republicans who tried to portray anyone demonstrating peacefully against police brutality as a bomb-wielding anarchist. 

So the speed with which the proposal to officially give emancipation its day was passed by Congress and signed into law by US President Joe Biden seemed surreal. We endured a year of concern that racial strife was on the verge of consuming the country, then we blinked and the US took another significant step towards racial equality.