In this powerful special edition of the AAS Podcast, host Tera Hunter—Chair of Princeton’s Department of African American Studies—leads an urgent and reflective Juneteenth conversation with distinguished scholars Joshua Guild and Khalil Gibran Muhammad. Together, they explore the deep historical roots and contemporary significance of Juneteenth, not merely as a commemoration of emancipation, but as a critical reminder of the ongoing struggle for Black freedom and justice in America.

The episode unpacks the delayed emancipation of enslaved people in Texas and how that moment has come to symbolize both liberation and the persistent deferral of true justice. The guests discuss how Juneteenth can serve as a tool for historical education and political awareness in a time of mounting resistance to teaching about race and systemic inequality. They confront today’s challenges—from voter suppression to book bans—and connect them to longstanding efforts to silence Black history.

Topics range from the fight for economic justice and the risk of performative recognition of Black holidays, to the power of grassroots organizing and the legacy of Black resistance. The conversation concludes with a call to action, encouraging listeners to move beyond celebration and toward meaningful engagement with their communities—through education, advocacy, and sustained activism.

Above all, the episode asks: What does freedom truly mean, and how do we continue to fight for it? With clear-eyed realism and a commitment to hope, this Juneteenth conversation invites listeners to reflect, resist, and reimagine the path forward.

Transcript:

[(0:06)] Tera W. Hunter: Welcome to the special Juneteenth episode of The AAS Podcast brought to you by the Department of African-American Studies at Preston University. I'm Tera Hunter-Edwards, Professor of American History and Chair of the Department of African-American Studies. Today, we have an incredible conversation ahead. I'm joined by Professors Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Joshua Guild, two brilliant scholars whose scholarship has deepened our understanding of black history, racial justice, and the enduring struggles for freedom in the United States and beyond. African Americans in Texas were emancipated from slavery on June 19th, 1865, two months after the Civil War ended, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. The celebration of the holiday began in 1866 and has grown in prominence ever since as Black Texans migrated across the country and the globe. But it became an official national holiday in 2021 after a long campaign. As we commemorate Juneteenth this year, we should reflect on its significance in history and reckon with its meaning for the ongoing fight for equality and justice. In today's political climate, where uncomfortable historical truths are actively erased, civil liberties, political and economic rights are under attack, it is especially crucial to pause to contemplate this history. We'll explore what Juneteenth can teach us, why it still matters, and what we can do to move forward. Let's get into it.

Juneteenth marks the delayed emancipation of enslaved people in Texas, delayed by two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was initiated and most immediately by two months after the Civil War ended and slavery was destroyed in the rest of the South. Why was freedom stalled there, and why does this matter?

[(1:53)] Khalil Gibran Muhammad: I think this is a great question because, first, it reminds us that the attempt to maintain slavery was a commitment for the Confederate States of America that was unyielding. And this was the last part of the Army, the Trans-Mississippi Army, that was the furthest west in the military campaign, that had only recently been defeated after the surrender at Appomattox. So you've got a situation where, essentially, black soldiers have finally liberated black Texans who had been enslaved. And I think one of the most remarkable aspects of the military end of the campaign in Texas at this moment is that General Granger's admonition in this moment, or should I say proclamation, I-I think of it as admonition, but his proclamation is, you're free, but go back to, go back to work. Don't expect anything from the federal government. And I think it's remarkably telling at how fragile freedom was for black Texans in this moment, and ultimately for black Americans in the nation.

[(2:51)] Joshua B. Guild: I would say that one of the things that this moment marks and reminds us, and why I think the Juneteenth holiday is so significant, is that it underscores the sort of difference, the distinction, really significant distinction between freedom and emancipation. And that, you know, that freedom is a process, it's an ongoing process, it's a process that extends well beyond any declaration, any proclamation, any particular singular historical moment, um, but it unfolds over a period of time. I think this moment also shows for us or reminds us the link between policy and enforcement, and that the simple proclam-, the Emancipation Proclamation itself, required enforcement, and that more broadly, emancipation as itself a-a kind of process also required enforcement. In this case, it required the presence of the Union troops to enforce something that had already been declared, uh, in Washington thousands of miles away.

[(3:42)] Khalil: I-I, there's one other thing. I mean, I love this notion of process because, um, I was reminded of this recently, uh, rereading our colleague Annette Gordon-Reed's on Juneteenth, kind of a memoir and history of growing up in Texas and learning more about the holiday. And it's obvious, but we often don't talk about it, which is that slavery actually continues in the border states. The Emancipation Proclamation only freed those who were warring against the nation, uh, which included Texas, but it took much longer. And so, in Kentucky, Delaware, many parts of the border states, it takes the ratification of the 13th Amendment to formally end legal slavery in the United States. And then they had a loophole. And we'll talk about that.

[(4:23)] Tera: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And in Texas, there was a lot of violence, as Joshua was pointing out, the enforcement that was required, partly because there was so much resistance on the part of former Confederates and planters, and so on. So that's really important. So the federal holiday, the federal government made it an official holiday in 2021, in the backdrop of a long fight for making it a holiday, and the most immediate impact of the unprecedented protest movement in the summer of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin. Can you share your thoughts about the holiday being named in that particular moment?

[(4:59)] Joshua: I think it's important that we remember that the federal recognition of the holiday in 2021 is really a culmination of decades and decades of not just celebration, but also recognition in other ways, in other, in other... Texas, for example, recognizes it as a state holiday in 1980, more than 40 years before the federal government and a series of other states over the, over, uh, ensuing decades will also come to recognize it in different ways. Federal legislation to, uh, to, um, federal legislation to have the holiday recognized, uh, nationally was first introduced in the House of Representatives in 1996. So again, a 15-year, uh, process that brings us to, uh, 2021 when President Biden signs, uh, signs the law. Obviously, there is the political moment of, uh, coming out of the summer of 2020 and the racial justice protests of that time. But I think that formal recognition in 2021 is really a result of both those decades of efforts to have it recognized in these, in these various locales. The reality of celebrations, people had been celebrating for a century and a half, essentially, starting in Texas. And then that political moment. So it was three things sort of coming together in 2021.

[(6:11)] Khalil: I love that, Joshua, that you shared the, um, specific backstory, because it is an important reminder that these, um, breakthroughs don't just happen overnight, that there are people who work behind the scenes. While Texas, of course, had been celebrating since 1865, the state, as you point out, formally recognizes it. So there was a lot of momentum, at least regionally, for something that could be widely shared. I also want to just lift up, uh, since you shouted out those folks, uh, two people who had organized the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation. A woman named Dr. Opal Lee, who was a 96-year-old Texan at the time that this happened and who was considered the grandmother of Juneteenth. And she worked alongside a gentleman named Reverend Ronald V. Meyer, Sr., so a lot of people put their back into this. I do think, though, we should pause and take stock of what 2021 looked like in terms of what was possible in this country relative to where we are now. And I know we'll talk more about this, but on the point of Juneteenth, I mean, so much of the political recognition of black liberation struggles or what I often call pro-democracy movements in this country, because that's what they've been, are creatures of the kind of, um, groundswell of solving a crisis, a kind of management crisis for the government.

So here you've got 15 to 25, 25, 15 to 26 million people protesting in the streets, largely for racial justice, overwhelmingly white, in parts of the country where white people are the only residents, black people are not present or don't live. And for Joe Biden, who had essentially come into office on the heels of declaring that hate has no place in America and saying that the Charlottesville riot, which occurred in 2017 at the beginning of Trump's presidency, which included white nationalists saying such things as Jews will not replace us and organizing really to keep up a Confederate monument. Joe Biden's promise to essentially recognize the importance of racial equity and justice in this country as president, this is one legislative achievement that results in that moment. But looking back, this may in fact be the first holiday, national or federal holiday in this country, where, in places like Texas and in numerous other states, you actually can't teach the underlying story of slavery. And I just want to lift up in Texas in particular, which passed its anti-critical race theory law in the summer of 2021, which is to say it happened at around the same time. I can't remember if it's just before or just after, but it's around the same time as the Juneteenth holiday takes effect, has a clause in it that says you cannot teach slavery in Texas classrooms, but as an aberration to America's values of freedom and liberty.

So it's an astonishing, immediate response to the implications of Juneteenth. And I do worry that we can imagine a future, either this year or next, where the federal government may attempt to transform even what Juneteenth means to most Americans.

[(9:12)] Joshua: I think that is a fascinating, uh, point that you make about the way that, um, the-the role that states play. It reminds me actually of the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday, uh, which was, uh, the-the last federal holiday before Juneteenth was recognized in 2021. That was signed into law by President Reagan in 1983. Again, the culmination of a long, a long history of struggle. But over between 1980s and the early 2000s, the struggle that local activists had to make in numerous states to have their states recognize the holiday, most famously in Arizona and New Hampshire, which were a long time holdouts. And so I think that's a, it's an interesting sort of contrast we might think about in terms of what the MLK holiday has come to represent and how it's been recognized or not recognized and celebrated by states, and the federal recognition of Juneteenth and-and what will happen in the, in the years to come.

[(10:01)] Khalil: It's a really great point.

[(10:02)] Tera: Before we move on from the summer of-of 2020 and its implications, I wonder if you might say more about how do you sort of reckon with that-that-that shift from this moment of there was, there was like a turning point moment with the summer protests, this unprecedented level of Americans across the-the continent, essentially, sometimes organized, sometimes spontaneously protesting, there was a moment of hopefulness. And yet what you just described is a reversal, you know, a complete reversal in many ways. So, how do you sort of, what do you think about that-that shift from 2020 to not very long after, you know, '21, when we see this reversal of these changes that are, that seem to be forthcoming? And how do you account for it?

[(10:44)] Khalil: Yeah, I mean, for me, I mean, as you know, we're all historians in this conversation, but it looks a lot like the redemption of the Reconstruction era in-in the South, a period when the Southern supremacists are committed to reinscribing a form of oppression for black people. They are trying to circumvent new federal legislation, and eventually they went over the courts and are successful, and they essentially "redeem" the South from the federal government's intrusion in the name of so-called black rights and freedoms. One way to think about the reaction to the summer of 2020 is to appreciate that the possibility for transformation of the country had never been more, uh, powerful and, uh, proximate to the moment as that summer. And I say that to some degree because we do often think of the civil rights movement and its kind of long 10-year period from the Montgomery bus boycott movement to the, uh, passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 as this incomparable moment of social movement activism. And it was, but it was different in at least one regard. It was different in the fact that there were far fewer white people who were willing to make the kinds of public displays of outrage to what was happening in the country, and to some degree, put their bodies on the line. We've never seen that concentration of white commitment in some form. Some people will say it was performative. Those criticisms are real to a person, but I think in the macro sense, there had never been anything like it. And the reason I want to emphasize that point is because I think that then spurred a reaction that needed to be equal and opposite, needed to be as forceful and as powerful to put the proverbial genie back in the bottle.

And so very quick summary, we can talk about this more, but someone like Christopher Ruffo, who has now become an architect of the federal government's attempt to erase history, including black history, LGBTQ history, and many histories that are a threat to this particular government, first takes to the airwaves in the summer of 2020 to call for the Trump administration to cancel or ban diversity in federal training. Trump writes an executive order in September of 2020, still in office. This is not long after the Lafayette Square uprising, where he shows a fort, he-he calls out General Mark Milley to show a force of national resistance to lawful protests. And we're off to the racist. There's a bill in Congress sponsored by Senator Tom Cotton called the Save America History Act, which essentially calls any discussion of America's original sin of rot and anti-American and should be purged from every American classroom. So that's before we actually get to Joe Biden's presidency. So the way I look at it is the possibility and strength and show of force for a racial reckoning and racial justice produced a powerful backlash reminiscent of the period of redemption in the Southern period after reconstruction.

[(13:46)] Joshua: I think again, part of what you're saying Khalil and-and what that-that moment we might, as you sort of extended it a little bit back before 2020, that's how long we think of it maybe as a decade from the sort of mid 2010 to the, to-to where we are now, shows that it's kind of a both and, right? Both things like, so it's not so much, or I would not think of it necessarily in terms of movement and response, right? One to the other, but actually both things are happening simultaneously, right? So, in your earlier discussion of thinking about Texas restricting the kind of curricular offerings and the framings of slavery. That's a process that's happening again in multiple states at the same time. So on the one hand, you have efforts from 2020 and a little bit before to expand the teaching of American history, to be more inclusive, to include black history, to mandate cultural competency. That's happening in certain states. And then at the same time, in other states, there's the restriction, right? And those things are happening kind of at the same time or simultaneously. And I think that, uh, that summer of 2020, you're absolutely right, that does produce an incredible backlash, but the seeds of that, as you've already said, have already there, right? And I think that's important for us to remember. So it's for us to not necessarily think of what's come since 2020 as being a reversal, a total reversal of something or-or something unprecedented, but that the precedent is not even, we don't even have to go back to the 19th century or the 1960s, but we can just look back even within the previous decade to see some of this already.

[(15:13)] Tera: Juneteenth includes a lot of cultural traditions that folks in Texas developed over the years and then transplanted. What are your thoughts on the traditions associated with the holiday, how migration influenced it? And now that it is an official day off from work, is it at risk of being overly commercialized or taken for granted as performative? And is there anything to be done to resist this, to resist this dilution?

[(15:37)] Khalil: I think the nature of the politics of commemoration mean that the farther away you get from the official reckoning or the recognition or-or the moment of history that is being commemorated, uh, there's going to be some dilution. There's going to be a kind of broadening. I think it's a natural process. It's not even specific to this case. Many examples we could give, and we think of Memorial Day in this country, right? You know, its origins versus what it is now, which is just the-the unofficial start to summer and barbecues and so forth for-for, I think, the vast majority of Americans. One of the challenges I think with the Juneteenth holiday that I see is-is balancing, um, the historical specificity of what produced the holiday and what it, what it is meant to recognize and commemorate with the kind of capaciousness of it. And this is even apart from any process of commercialization that we might think of. So is it simply a recognition of emancipation? Is it a recognition of the end of slavery? Is it recognition of the long struggles over, uh, racial and economic justice in this country? It's become a little bit of all of those things, and I think it will continue to evolve over time. And that's, I think, one of the-the challenges that I see as the holiday evolves and our commemoration evolves.

[(16:47)] Joshua: That's great. I love the-the evoking the notion of the politics of commemoration because I think you're right. I mean, Americans have very short memories for the painful parts of our past, including our own ability to honor, uh, those lost in-in combat in a more fulsome and truthful way. You asked about the holiday itself, and I-I just, I just wanted to say, I mean, like, I didn't grow up celebrating Juneteenth. I don't know, Tara.

[(17:10)] Tera: I was gonna ask you that. No, I didn't. I grew up in Florida. You grew up...

[(17:13)] Khalil: In Chicago.

[(17:14)] Tera: And Josh.

[(17:15)] Joshua: Boston, yeah. So, I mean, you know, dear white listener, black folks are new to Juneteenth holiday celebrations too, which I think surprises people. It really was a Texas thing. And you asked the question about migration, and it did move. I mean, I looked up a few years ago when the holiday was new, when I was trying to make sense of it myself, you can find, uh, images, sort of historical images of Juneteenth pageants being celebrated in many parts of Texas, but also in places as far flung as Richmond, Virginia and Louisiana. So, and because so many black folks are migrants from those black belt states, from Mississippi and Louisiana to Texas, that makes sense too, that there's a back and forth. I also just want to say, like, I grew up drinking red pop, right? It was terrible, red dye, horrible for your body. But this is a thing, part of a celebration, they call it Red Soda Water. And I'm not quite sure how it's made. It's probably not just made out of a can from Fanta, um, or something like that. But some of their traditions look essentially a lot like how black folks have celebrated the July 4th holiday. You know, with all of our tortured contradictions for what it means to have been enslaved and not really free in the moment of this country's founding, like folks want to enjoy these holidays as their own. And I think this invitation to Juneteenth, given the traditions that reflected parts of the country that were not obvious or even part of our family rituals, offers us yet another occasion. And I'll just say, because I have young adults, my kids are in their 20s, one of my kids is like, I'm no longer doing 4th of July and actually tried to mobilize in our town of South Orange and Maplewood, a law to essentially enshrine Juneteenth and shift fireworks from July 4th to Juneteenth. So I'm not quite sure where we are with that these days, but I do think that the traditions that are specific to that holiday, barbecuing, picnicking, red soda water, are now extending to other parts of Black America, and maybe a tiny slither of white America, to also just say this is a moment for celebration because that's what it was, you know, in its, in its basic form for Texans.

[(19:23)] Tera: Yeah, I agree with that.

[(19:24)] Joshua: Another important dimension of the holiday, as it was celebrated in Texas, and as I think it is and continues to be celebrated elsewhere, is the occupation of public space. I mean, so there were certainly emancipation celebrations of various kinds that took place in churches, Juneteenth celebrations in churches and in other institutions in our communities, but the most, I think, significant were outside and they were claims to public space starting in 1866 and continuing to the present in times and in places where occupying public space was-was fraught, to say the least, and-and proved a threat. And so I think that is another aspect of the holiday that is really significant that-that-that black people have sort of really connected with and I think will continue to perpetuate.

[(20:06)] Tera: Absolutely. What are your thoughts on the current political climate and how we might think about Juneteenth today? We've already started talking about this, but we're living in another era of setbacks and voting rights, civil liberties that resembles earlier iterations. How should we look at the current decline considering the longer history of struggles for black freedom?

[(20:27)] Khalil: Yeah, I-I struggle with this one a little bit because my working thesis, I'm-I'm working on a book which is a kind of treatment of the post-civil rights era kind of way to look back from this moment to make sense of choices made, paths taken and not taken. And one of the things, uh, I'm going to float with my colleagues here is that I think this moment is unique in this way. For the entire nearly 400 years, until the second Trump administration, really the first Trump administration, black people could imagine fighting for a new set of laws to fix an old set of laws, and that you could somehow create a framework of accountability and justice that was reliable and stable and dependable. This is certainly what the civil rights movement sought and has been defined as, although we all know here that the Black Freedom Movement was more expansive in its vision of justice and egalitarianism, and to transform this nation. That was cut short by a vicious and violent FBI that essentially destroyed that effort by assassination, by collusion, by provocateurs, and so on. But if we hold at least the thesis I have here, that up until the successes of the civil rights movement, there was this desire for a tangible legislative fix. I'm not sure that there's a tangible legislative fix to this one. Not-not only because we're not, I mean, we can have a conversation about dealing with gerrymandering and voter suppression laws. I mean, that's there. We can certainly have a conversation about strengthening anti-discrimination laws. It's been shredded and torn apart and dismantled and actually rendered by reverse logic that over the past 60 years, as Trump said at a rally in Nevada in January, has been a massive effort of reverse discrimination against white people.

My point, partly, is that, yes, there are some technical fixes we can go back to the drawing board for. We tried to get a George Floyd Policing Act passed, uh, in the first Congress under Joe Biden's administration. Didn't happen. So I'm not dismissing that. I am suggesting here that we've reached a point where the nation has a choice. It can try to go back to business as usual, which is to say, accept a certain level of base inequality for many peoples of color in this country, with black people being the kind of canaries in that coal mine. Or it can push forward with a recognition that that didn't work for 400 years. We need something new and face the possibility that we might lose that battle in the face of an authoritarian regime that has some kind of electoral backing. It's not a mandate, but it's there and it's real. There is a racist populist movement that supports this president and a party that supports this president, that suggests to me that-that a legal pathway is not going to get us there. And I don't... that's the thesis. In which case, that would make this unchartered territory for us in terms of how do we imagine what's coming next? What do you think, Josh?

[(23:19)] Joshua: I think that sounds largely correct. Thank you.

[(23:22)] Khalil: I appreciate that.

[(23:23)] Joshua: It's somewhat dispiriting, but-but I think, I think it's important for us to be, um, clear-eyed about the moment, right? And-and so that some of what has worked in the past or what has been possible in the past is-is not possible. It's not even useful, I think is actually a way I would put it, um, some of, some of the ways that we might think-think ourselves forward. And this moment requires great imagination. And yes, we have historical examples. Yes, we can take inspiration from the past, but there are certain ways and ways in which I think you've very articulately laid out for us that require us to think really anew, to really think something different, systemically different, structurally different. And it's not about laying hope in, uh, you know, the midterm elections. It's not a single Supreme Court justice that's gonna swing the court, you know, one vote or another. I mean, I think, I think we're beyond that point now. And so maybe part of what looking back to Juneteenth or looking back to emancipation struggles is-is-is imagining the unimaginable. I think that's something that we can take from-from that history.

[(24:23)] Khalil: Yeah, I really like, I-I love that. And I think that's-that's the power, that's the pregnant possibility that we saw emerge and the kind of abolitionist discourse and organizing in Mariam Kaba's work and others who continue to build community through mutual aid work. I mean, it's, and you know this is, this is, this is your scholarship. It's all there. And I think to your point about imagining the unimaginable is exactly what is happening in those furtive spaces.

[(24:51)] Tera: So maybe we'll come back to this at the end to talk about some other pathways. But I want to turn to education because there's been increasing attacks on education at all levels, especially with respect to discussing matters of race and the country's history of racism. Books and courses are banned. The mere recitation of certain words and phrases that are associated with social justice are being excised from public utterance and recognition. So, how can we promote and teach history and deeper values that Juneteenth represents in this context?

[(25:20)] Khalil: I think there needs to be, on one hand, I think there needs to be formal resistance, institutional resistance to some of these things, uh, resistance to government interference and to academic freedom, uh, resistance to some of the funding threats. And we've seen this in-in recent weeks with some of our major private universities getting together, filing lawsuits, and so forth in federal court to resist the kind of immediate threats posed by the Trump administration. That work needs to continue, needs to expand. More colleges and universities and leaders of higher education, as well as, of course, teachers unions, professors unions, faculty unions, need to join in that fight formally. At the same time, I think we need to make an affirmative case for Black Studies. And I think the affirmative case for Black Studies is about not just the content of what Black Studies is, but the critical lens that Black Studies offers us to help us understand this moment. Most of all, I think we need to all exhibit a willingness to work outside of institutions, given the constraints that are being placed upon us in terms of policy and in terms of kind of institutional norms, that we have to go back in some ways to the roots of Black Studies, which is fugitive, right? Which is about the teaching of history, the teaching of culture, the passing on of traditions that doesn't require state sanction, that can happen in spaces outside of schools, outside of some of these institutions that happen in communities, can literally happen in parks. We have access now to internet and there's ways in which we can disseminate information that way, um, so I think some of our energies have to be directed a little bit more in those directions and a little bit less in, or at the, at least at the same time as, as we're trying to fight at this kind of formal institutional level.

[(26:52)] Joshua: Yeah. I like the reminder that we don't need permission to teach the truth. We may take risks if we do that inside of classrooms and certainly at some of our public colleges and universities, and potentially increasingly at our private ones. That's a really powerful reminder. I also think it's important to just take stock of precisely what is happening and to, in my opinion, use language that describes it for what it is. So at the state level, we already have seen roughly two dozen states pass laws that criminalize the teaching of race or gender discrimination, sexuality, and many aspects of American history, as we've talked about, including sanitizing slavery are somehow not really that important to the American past. That-that is a problem regardless of who wins the next election in the presidential race in 2028. That-that is there to stay to some degree, um, which I want to just name as part of a war on truth and education.

[(27:48)] Khalil: We often talk about this as a culture war, which to me belittles the degree to which we might disagree about the relative merits of each of our cultural predispositions or ideological positions and then make war through media and social media. No, the War on Truth and Education is textbook for authoritarian regimes. And I'm just going to draw on the work of my colleague, our colleague Jason Stanley, who wrote a wonderful book called Erasing History: How Fascists Control the Past, Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. And what's great about this book is that he looks specifically at the agenda and vision of the world and truth and education in the United States in comparison to contemporary authoritarian regimes, particularly Viktor Orban's Hungary, Modi's India, and Erdogan's Turkey, in addition to also recognizing Putin and Russia. And the common theme across all of these spaces is that destroying the capacity of institutions and individuals to think critically about their government, to express positions and their voice in opposition to that government, to essentially kill dissent, is fundamental to ushering in even through democratic means of fascism.

So I hope that in this moment of resistance, whether it happens fugitively in Saturday school or church basements on Sunday, whether it happens through coordinated collective resistance on our university campuses, that all of us recognize that black history has been the scapegoat for a so-called war on woke and describing Marxist lunatics, or as JD Vance said, universities are the enemy or professors are the enemy. It's-it's the three of us in this conversation that are archetypal for who they have targeted, who we are as individuals, who we represent, the histories that we bring to bear in our, in our lived experience, and of course, the professional work that we do. And I want people to really appreciate that there is an enemies list, not just the political retribution for the Biden administration, there is an enemies list in an expansive sense for exactly who we are and what we represent. And that's going to take a level of fight and resistance that we're not trained to, trained for. But we have to figure this out because those are the stakes, not just for our own survival, but whatever role we might play in keeping this nation from becoming an authoritarian... Well, it's already authoritarian government, but from becoming an authoritarian nation, I think, partly depends on us.

[(30:19)] Joshua: One of the things that your comments, I think, remind me and help me to think about is the way that Black Studies as a, as a kind of target, right, or at least as the kind of, um, as being emblematic of this war on woke, really extends broadly, right? And so, and I think this-this should actually give us some inspiration to make common cause, right? To-to-to-to-to broaden, uh, the-the base of resistance, if you will, right? Because it's not just, of course, the teaching of black history, as we've said, gender discrimination, women's history, sexual minorities. It's also, we've seen over the last year, crackdowns on folks standing up against genocide, standing up in solidarity with liberation movements. It is also, we've also seen a war on science, right? So you talk about a kind of war on truth. It's not just historical truth, right? And so I think this-this should-should give us inspiration to join as Black Studies scholars and as historians with all of our colleagues and also our students who have a desire to teach and to learn freely. And as you say, this is part of a much, a much bigger struggle against authoritarianism.

[(31:26)] Khalil: Yeah. Yeah. Just a quick anecdote, a couple of weeks ago, during the hands-off protests that took place around the country. Several here in New Jersey, in Princeton proper, and where I live in South Orange. My wife and I attended the one in New York City, which the New York Times estimated was 20 blocks spanning Fifth Avenue. We certainly knew that there were tens of thousands of people out there. And our sign, you know, is kind of tricky, like, how do you figure out all the things to keep this government's "hands off"? But it started with universities, DEI, human rights, and protesters. And you're exactly right. The notion that we live in a country now where we are explicitly dismantling our commitment to human rights around the world. Like, look, all of us know the United States has a very mixed record and is often a purveyor of human rights violations and has been. But at the same time, the nation, through USAID and its foreign policy agenda, has supported, particularly the fight against malaria and AIDS, which have saved millions of people of African descent in other parts of the world. So it's a mixed story. But just for this conversation, as of mid-April, the State Department issued guidance that basically revised our human rights commitments around the world, striking from it essentially the basic protection for freedom of speech, assembly, protectionists against states' violence, etc., as new guidance for our own foreign policy agenda. It is incredible how explicit this government is in its attempt to destroy any capacity for people to protect others or to resist it.

[(32:57)] Tera: So, I want to turn to economic factors and how they've played a major role in why emancipation was delayed in Texas and have shaped African-Americans' conception of freedom from the beginning of slavery up through today. What role does economic injustice and justice play in the legacy of Juneteenth?

[(33:15)] Khalil: So, we talked about this a little bit, I mean, in Granger's order, which I think is just an important reminder of, as-as Joshua said earlier, freedom is a process. Well, black people were essentially told, you're no longer a slave, but you might continue to work as a slave here in Texas. Because as Barbara Fields reminds us, the historian who helped make visible to both other scholars and to many readers more recently, like Ta-Nehisi Coates, the journalist, that-that slavery was about oppression, not about hate. That the point of enslaved or putting Africans on slavers to enslave them here in this country was not to reproduce white supremacy, it was to produce profits. And the failures of freedom in the wake of Juneteenth, in the wake of, uh, the 13th Amendment's passage in December of 1865, the failures of our full freedom were because of the exigencies of capitalism, um, going back to work, uh, which is to say to coerce and to exploit and to oppress black people's labor. So we have a problem, uh, baked into the bones of this nation, uh, one that has been harder for folks in the civil rights community and many black folks in particular socialize to believe in our own freedom to come face to face and to confront those economic realities. There's always been a, there's been a communist back left. Paul Robeson, to some degree, was part of it. A socialist one, Du Bois was certainly part of it, and Ella Baker and many others. Cornel West describes himself as a democratic socialist. But there's always been a kind of unhealthy gap between privileging the need for an economic revolution, some kind of change that would not be formative to exploiting people as part of the system of capital accumulation in and of itself, and our commitment to civil and rights and social justice. We need to do way better. And I'm, you know, grateful for my colleagues here in this department, like Kianga, Imaata Taylor, who is one of the leading thinkers around this space. But that's how I think about it. This is another opportunity for us to revisit the intertwined nature of our economic exploitation and our racial exploitation, and to not let that combined toxic force go. It has to stay front and center for the work ahead.

[(35:32)] Joshua: I don't know if I have anything to add to that. I think that, um, Khalil is absolutely correct that the, that-that we have to start to think or continue to think rather about disentangling the notion of inclusion into the society, uh, disentangling inclusion into a democracy versus inclusion into a capitalist economy, right? And those-those two things actually have necessarily conflated, have been conflated over time, but I think the real work is to separate them out. And I think it's one thing to be included in any kind of processes, democratic processes that we have in this country. It's another thing to have a kind of an agenda of economic fairness, which is really not possible in the way that, uh, the capitalism is structured for and that has been put in place for hundreds of years. And that we do have a rich tradition in the black community of thinkers and activists who have tried to make those distinctions, have tried to push an agenda that asks us to think really, ask some really difficult questions about what it means to be included.

[(36:26)] Tera: So I want to go back to what you both were suggesting earlier, um, to push us toward concluding this podcast episode, to think about alternative pathways, the importance of imagination as we go forward and thinking about what can we do differently, especially in light of what you said about how the legal possibilities are kind of being foreclosed, the pathway through the law, given the, you know, probably the most obstructionist presidential administration ever with regard to respect for the law is now our new norm. So, in thinking about those who want to honor Juneteenth in the best ways, what are some tangible things that they can do to commemorate the holiday? And beyond that, also, what can they do, what can we do, um, to make more constructive contributions towards expanding freedom and democracy in our communities?

[(37:16)] Joshua: One of the things that people who want to celebrate and honor Juneteenth can do, of course, is to engage deeply with history and to kind of move beyond the superficial, to move beyond the performative, to spend time, whether in families or in smaller groups, communities, really trying to understand the history of enslavement and emancipation. And more specifically, I think for Americans, that means engaging the history of slavery and emancipation beyond the Confederacy, the former Confederacy. So, really unders-, think and understand, um, the ways that the system of enslavement connected the entire nation, right? Connected to-to states that were not part of the Confederacy, connected to all of our major cities in America, have economic connections, historical economic connections to enslavement to try to really understand that history, spend some time in your local communities wherever you are in this country. As part of it, just not see slavery as something that happened over there or that happened only in Texas or the, you know, the former Confederacy as part of this Juneteenth celebration.

I think, again, really spending some time honoring the specificity of the emancipation story and the historical specificity of it is-is part of it. And I guess lastly, in terms of expanding our democracy, understanding that the struggle is a long-term struggle. How we got to where we are now is not the result of one or two election cycles. It's been generations in the making, and it's going to take generations, unfortunately, to-to un-make it and to make something new. And I think that's the work that we have to commit ourselves to. And I think June 19th every year is a wonderful time to sort of mark that occasion and start thinking about what we'll do in the year to come.

[(38:50)] Khalil: Yeah, I-I like all of that. And I, and I just want to kind of add by way of anecdote that coming back to sort of this balance between how black people have borne the burden of being, as Nicole Hannah-Jones wrote in the 1619 project, the perfectors of democracy, or as I refer to them as at the vanguard of pro-democracy movements in this country. This is, this is, as in the way that Joshua described it, this is another opportunity to bequeath, particularly to younger generations, that heritage and to give them a-a sense of connection to this moment. So here's the anecdote. Years ago, I was headed to Albany, Georgia, which was the site of a famous local battle against a sheriff, Lori Pritchett, who won that battle because as the civil rights activist in that community, Shirley Sherrod, who later worked under the Obama administration until she was attacked by conservatives and her husband, Charles Sherrod, had been young people in that community trying to fight segregation in that town. And one of the local leaders said they were having a lot of trouble getting young people to participate in the local effort to fight. And her name is Marion King, no relation to Dr. King. And so Marion King is later telling the historian Clayborne Carson, who wrote about this, that it wasn't until they taught young people why segregation existed in the first place that they got it. And she-she says to Carson in the, in the, uh, in the interview, you could see the light bulbs come up, uh, come on in their eyes. And that's our opportunity again. Juneteenth is a moment for celebration, uh, of what happened in the past and the freedom struggles that led to the end of slavery for black people, and the fight that they waged to achieve that goal, to imagine the unimaginable.

But we have, we have to do that same kind of work with our young people. But at the same time, our young people were also teaching us. And so there is an opportunity here, whether it happens on Juneteenth or happens in the spirit of Juneteenth, to get back to basics. All political organizing is a creature of collective mobilization, of targeted knowledge, of information people need to understand how to respond and overcome whatever the moment is, however, whatever the challenge is. And I'll kind of leave with this point because all of us have spent our entire careers as educators, whether it's in the classroom or speaking to audiences of one kind or another. And I don't know about you two, but for years I can remember being challenged. Oh, well, that's all fine, well and good, you know, but what are we going to do? And there's always been this tension for some public audiences between sort of describing things as they were, discussing what is possible, which all feels like, you know, kind of the critics, skeptical, the skeptics' voice, talk is cheap, so what are we going to do about it? And I've always felt like those people were discounting how powerful knowledge and language actually are. And it seems to me that if there was ever a moment to prove that case, it is now.

The war on truth and education shows us precisely that if we use knowledge as a kind of kryptonite to oppression and fascism, if we speak truth as a form of dissent to express what is wrong in the moment, we are exercising one of the most powerful tools we have of resistance in addition to what we do collectively, in addition to how we mobilize in whatever many ways that that can occur. The fact that this administration has essentially criminalized pronouns and a kind of mocking gesture of how absurd... if they were absurd, then why pay attention to them in the first place? Has stricken from federal contracts and grants more than a hundred words, including women, for crying out loud, that cannot be mentioned, lest one be accused of a DEI agenda, which has been rendered illegal by executive order, which is likely unconstitutional. Folks, don't give up the power of your voice. Ideas matter. Conveying knowledge. Debating that knowledge. Being in community with others to explore that knowledge. That is part of our arsenal of resistance that we must be committed to.

[(42:59)] Tera: So Khalil, you just anticipated my last question, which is about what are you most hopeful about? And what you just expressed, I think, captures that. Would either of you like to add anything else?

[(43:09)] Joshua: One of the things that history teaches us is that systems are made. They don't just drop from the sky. They don't just organically emerge, but they are made. And the corollary to that is that they can be unmade. And I think we have to remind ourselves when things appear to be overwhelmingly intractable, that there have been people in other historical circumstances, whether in this country or elsewhere, who faced things that appeared to be overwhelmingly intractable, systems that appeared to be so pervasive, so, you know, so omniscient and omnipresent as to, as-as to constitute almost the air that one breathes. And yet those things changed. Those things were overcome through popular resistance, through changing historical forces, economic changes, a number of different factors. And so even as we become overwhelmed and sort of inundated with-with images and-and messages of despair, of powerlessness, that is actually the system trying to do its work, which is to hold on to its power. And we have to resist that and fight that. And the abolitionist writer and organizer, Miriam Kaba, who we've already invoked, she says that hope is a discipline. Hope doesn't just come to us. Hope isn't just a magical force in the ether, right? Hope is something that we have to cultivate in ourselves. And I think, I-I sometimes like to think a little bit less in terms of hope and more in terms of possibility. And so I think we have to look for these-these spaces of possibility and crack them open and make them bigger and wider.

[(44:31)] Khalil: Yeah, I like that. I have two things to say to finish. First, this is my first podcast with the African American Studies department. I couldn't be happier to be here to join you all as colleagues in our commitment to educating and to acknowledging the histories and producing new knowledge to help others to make sense of the past and the country and the world we live in today. The second point I have is that we are in Morrison Hall, named for Toni Morrison, and, um, I gain hope from her body of work, but particularly an essay she wrote in 1995 called Racism and Fascism. And she describes 10 steps. She sort of evokes the history of the Holocaust and says there's not just a final solution, but there's a first, a second. And I won't go through those. I just encourage folks listening to look it up. You can, you can find it online. But the last thing she says is the one that Joshua reminds us is so important. She says, the point of it all is to maintain silence at all costs. And if we keep that in mind, it is our voice, whether individual or collective, that is such a powerful weapon in this moment. And I'm glad to be able to use it here in this conversation with two of my wonderful new colleagues. And I think others have that same power. They just have to use it.

[(45:46)] Tera: Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate both of you. This has been an inspiration for me, and I've learned a lot just by, um, engaging you today. So I want to end with this. One way to think about Juneteenth is that it marked a new beginning for people subjected to hundreds of years of bondage. Historians refer to the era of Reconstruction when the holiday began as a second founding, the second chance for America to achieve a real democracy. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the US Constitution were passed, abolishing slavery, affirming birthright citizenship, and the right to do process and extending voting rights to black men. We should certainly use that energy and forward thinking as we reflect on the enduring meaning of the holiday this year.

If today's discussion resonated with you, we encourage you to keep listening, reading, and participating in activities related to black history and culture. Keep building and supporting institutions that support black futures. And I thank my colleagues once again, Khalil Gilbran Muhammad and Joshua Guild, for sharing their expertise and insights. And thanks to you, our listeners, for tuning in. Until next time, stay curious, stay engaged, and let's keep pushing for freedom and justice for all.

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