“You must never, ever give up. We must keep the faith because we are one people. We are brothers and sisters. We all live in the same house: The American house.” — Representative John Lewis

Today is Juneteenth, also called Emancipation Day, or Juneteenth Independence Day, a holiday honoring the end of chattel slavery in the United States after the Civil War. It commemorates June 19, 1865, when the US Army issued General Order No. 3, which transmitted the Emancipation Proclamation to the enslaved people of Texas, informing them that they had actually been freed from slavery over two years prior in the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862. A Juneteenth holiday was signed into Federal law in 2021.

The celebration of Juneteenth doesn’t remove the dark marks on our collective history that brought us to this day – slavery and its long-term impact, the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, the killing of George Floyd, or the recent racist murders in Buffalo, NY by a white supremacist – but it brings the importance of allyship and racial solidarity to the forefront. This allyship can be seen between the AAPI and Black communities in the understanding of the long-term social and economic impact of systemic racism and the quest for reparations.  

The history of reparations is complicated. After the Emancipation Proclamation, some slaveowners received reparations for the freedom of their slaves from the federal government with the District of Columbia Emancipation Act, with slaves themselves receiving nothing. And many slaveowners received compensation for the loss of their free labor from their state and local governments dating back to the American Revolution.* 

The state of California established the first committee of its kind in the nation, the California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans (Reparations Task Force), to “study slavery, its effects throughout American history, and the compounding harms that the United States and Californian governments have inflicted upon African Americans.”** Their interim report outlining the impact of chattel slavery and systemic discrimination was just released on June 1, 2022, and the final report with an initial set of recommendations for the California legislature is due in 2023. The state of New Jersey introduced Bill NJ S322 in January 2020, to establish a similar group, the New Jersey Reparations Task Force, to examine the same issues in their state. 

The Japanese American experience of wartime incarceration, devastating social and financial impacts and eventual reparations has led to allies testifying in Congress in support of Bill HR 40 calling for a national commission to look at the long-term impact of legal and illegal systemic racism that has led to racial disparities in education, housing, and wealth, in the same manner, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 examined those issues in the Japanese American community after WWII. The experiences are very different, but also very much the same. 

One of the most important lessons of the complicated history behind the Juneteenth holiday is that despite how we arrived on her shores, we are all Americans and all in this together. And the Fred T. Korematsu Institute honors Juneteenth for what it represents and shows us of the past, but also as an opportunity to always consider each other’s stories and work together as allies to step forward into an equitable and inclusive future.

* Tera W. Hunter (@TeraWHunter), “When Slaveowners Got Reparations”, NY Times, April 16, 2019.

** State of California Department of Justice, Office of the Attorney General, “California Reparations Task Force Releases Interim Report Detailing Harms of Slavery and Systemic Discrimination on African Americans”, June 1, 2022. https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/california-reparations-task-force-releases-interim-report-detailing-harms