My 2 cents

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. From Watch Night to the Isolated Coast
3. The Dual Harm of Modern Censorship
4. The Ultimate Goal: A Divided Working Class
5. Glossary of Terms
6. Bibliography & Further Reading

Introduction

Today marks exactly five years since Juneteenth was officially recognized as a federal holiday. It is a milestone that naturally invites us to look back at the historical timeline. But as I reflect on this watershed moment in American history, I find myself looking at it through a dual lens: that of a technical professional who thinks daily about how information moves, and that of an amateur historian who understands what happens when that movement is intentionally stopped.

When we talk about Juneteenth, we often treat it as a story of a slow-moving past—a consequence of an era before smartphones and instant messaging. We tell ourselves that it simply took two and a half years for the news of the Emancipation Proclamation to travel from Washington, D.C., to the coastal docks of Galveston, Texas.

But a 900-day delay isn’t a problem of slow transmission. It is a record of a dominant class weaponizing silence to hoard an illicit economic advantage by any means necessary.

The tragedy of Galveston wasn’t that the news couldn’t get through. It was that the people who held the power in Texas—the plantation owners and local authorities—knew exactly what the law said, and actively chose to suppress it. By keeping the truth hidden, they bought themselves two more years of stolen, backbreaking labor to pull millions of dollars worth of cotton from the earth. They didn’t just delay a message; they aggressively ran out the clock to milk an illegal system for every last drop of profit they could extract.

This historical pattern of holding onto systemic advantage at all costs is something I understand on a personal level.

I grew up in South Carolina and started first grade in 1968. The landmark Civil Rights Act had been passed into law in 1964, legally outlawing segregation. Yet, four years after the highest law of the land declared equality, I sat in a strictly segregated classroom for my first two grades of school. South Carolina was notoriously slow to adhere to the Civil Rights laws, quietly preserving their segregation practices for at least five years after they became illegal. Even at six years old, I distinctly remember sitting in the “colored only” section when my grandmother took me to the doctor.

The lesson of Galveston, and the lesson of my own childhood in the 1960s South, is identical: those who hold a systemic advantage do not give it up easily. When a dominant group benefits from an unjust system, they will intentionally throttle, delay, and ignore the law of the land to squeeze every last drop of privilege out of the status quo before the door is finally forced open.

From Watch Night to the Isolated Coast

Growing up in South Carolina, the story of Juneteenth wasn’t actually the focal point of my youth. In my community, our historical and spiritual foundation was centered around the Watch Night Service.

Held on New Year’s Eve, this deeply rooted tradition commemorates the night of December 31, 1862. In African American churches across the South, people gathered in the flickering candlelight, anxiously awaiting the midnight stroke that would bring the Emancipation Proclamation into effect. That was a moment of shared truth—a communal celebration happening in real-time, built on a network of faith and whispered hope.

But Texas was a different story. Safe from the immediate presence of Union troops, it became a geographic pocket where the truth could be suppressed by force. When President Lincoln signed the proclamation on January 1, 1863, the legal reality changed instantly, but the functional reality in Texas was kept in a state of artificial silence. Tens of thousands of people remained in bondage simply because the gatekeepers refused to hand over the key to the truth.

The Dual Harm of Modern Censorship

Last fall, I wrote about the enduring role of misinformation in shaping American history—how deliberate lies have been manufactured to distort our collective reality.

But Juneteenth forces us to confront a different, perhaps more insidious tactic: the power of withholding the story from the next generation.

We see this playing out vividly today in the relentless push to ban books and restrict educational curricula regarding Black history and identity. To understand the true gravity of this strategy, we have to look at the dual harm it inflicts on our children.

On one hand, the architecture of censorship is designed to rob Black children of their inheritance. In 1865, the truth was withheld to trap people in physical bondage. Today, the suppression of our history is a calculated attempt to keep Black children from understanding the immense power, resilience, and brilliance of their own lineage. If you can erase the victories of the Civil Rights movement, the profound organizing of the past, and the structural realities of systemic triumph from the classroom, you leave children without a blueprint for their own liberation. It is an effort to keep them from realizing that the very systems that restrict them today have been challenged and shaken before.

But the mechanism doesn’t stop there. The other, equally vital target of this modern gatekeeping is white American children.

By legally filtering what a white child can read or learn about our nation’s systemic past, the architects of these bans are intentionally creating an artificial silence. If you can control the narrative a child receives, you can shape their worldview as an adult. When the raw truth of history is withheld from them, they grow up insulated from the realities of systemic injustice, entirely unaware of the structural advantages and disadvantages that still shape our world today.

The Black community has a long, unbreakable tradition of passing down our own history; our families, churches, and community leaders will always ensure our children know who they are. But a closed school library door forces a devastating split: it starves Black children of the formal recognition of their power, while starving white children of the objective truth of their reality.

The Ultimate Goal: A Divided Working Class

The key to eradicating division and hate in this country lies entirely in teaching the next generation the unvarnished truth of our history. But the powers that wish to preserve the existing power dynamics know this. They understand that a shared understanding of the past leads to a shared empathy in the present—and empathy is dangerous to the status quo.

By keeping white children in the dark about the structural barriers built into American history, these gatekeepers ensure that the next generation preserves the old, divided narratives. The ultimate goal here isn’t just ideological; it is deeply practical. It is to keep the working class fractured.

When you keep people divided along cultural and racial lines, they spend their energy fighting one another over manufactured grievances rather than looking up to see who is actually benefiting from their division.

Juneteenth stands out in our history because it marks the exact moment where freedom and truth finally collided. It reminds us that rights on paper mean very little if the systems around us are designed to keep us from understanding them. If we want to honor those who stepped into the light in Galveston in 1865, we must actively dismantle the modern walls of withheld truth. We must ensure that the gates to our shared history remain open for every child in America—because a generation that knows the truth is a generation that cannot be divided.

Next week, we will go inside these pockets of withheld truth to examine the fallout of this strategy—and how denying our shared history directly fuels the modern phenomenon of “the white man’s grievance.” Stay tuned.

Glossary of Terms

• Artificial Silence / Latency: The deliberate withholding or delaying of information by an institutional gatekeeper to prevent a population from acting on the truth.
• Civil Rights Act of 1964: A landmark federal law in the United States that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and legally ended segregation in schools and public accommodations.
• Emancipation Proclamation: An executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, declaring that all enslaved people within Confederate-held territory were legally free.
• Gatekeeping: The process through which information is filtered, withheld, or controlled by individuals or institutions in power to maintain structural control.
• Juneteenth: A federal holiday celebrating the end of slavery in the United States, specifically commemorating June 19, 1865, when Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation—two and a half years after it was signed.
• Systemic Advantage: Social, economic, or political leverage built into the infrastructure of society that benefits one dominant group over others, often preserved through the manipulation of laws and information.
• Watch Night Service: A historic tradition in African American churches held on New Year’s Eve, tracing back to December 31, 1862 (“Freedom’s Eve”), when enslaved people gathered to await the midnight stroke that brought the Emancipation Proclamation into legal effect.

Bibliography & Further Reading

• Du Bois, W. E. B. (1935). Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. Russell & Russell.Explores the economic motivations behind the resistance to emancipation and the post-war efforts to re-establish control over Black labor.
• Gordon-Reed, Annette. (2021). On Juneteenth. Liveright Publishing.Provides the essential historical context of Galveston, Texas, detailing how geography and isolation allowed plantation owners to suppress the reality of emancipation.
• Kendi, Ibram X. (2016). Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. Bold Type Books.An analysis of how racial narratives and the suppression of truth have historically been constructed by elites to justify economic exploitation and keep the working class divided.
• Anderson, Carol. (2016). White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. Bloomsbury Publishing.Traces the history of structural pushback and rolling delays following major civil rights advancements, echoing the resistance to desegregation seen in the late 1960s.
• Glaude, Eddie S. Jr. (2020). Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. Crown Publishing Group.Examines the psychological consequences of what happens when a society refuses to teach its true history, particularly how it leaves white Americans insulated from systemic realities.