What Youth Day and Juneteenth Teach Us
This week we commemorate Youth Day in South Africa and Juneteenth in the U.S., major historical moments in each country’s struggle for Black liberation and racial equity. Both moments remind us that liberation is hard-won, and the quest is laden with paradoxes.
Youth Day honours a series of demonstrations and protests led by Black school-aged children against the apartheid regime’s imposition of Afrikaans as the language of instruction in their already-segregated and resource-starved schools. The events of 16 June 1976 turned violent when apartheid police opened fire on the young protesters killing hundreds. This painfilled moment was marked by profound loss and grief, yet from it, a new resolve was born. Previously weakened liberation efforts gained new recruits, giving energy to the movement against apartheid. And across the world, the apartheid government’s popularity waned as its brutality was seen exactly for what it was.
The paradox of pain and hope similarly plays out in the story of Juneteenth. Juneteenth—which marks the day enslaved Black people in Texas were emancipated—is celebrated by many Black American families as a day of reconnection. But in fact, when word of emancipation finally reached Galveston on 19 June 1865, enslaved Black people had been declared free by the Emancipation Proclamation more than two years prior. And so, while we celebrate their freedom on this day, we must also wrestle with the reality that these enslaved humans, who should not have been in bondage to begin with, were the last to know that they were in fact free.
Together, Youth Day and Juneteenth remind us that the struggle for a just world is untidy, marked at turns by moments of forward momentum, and by moments of seeming stagnation and regression.
Today, as the work continues to end structural racism and to build new institutions, policies and narratives that are rooted in the wellbeing of Black people and people of colour, it is clear that we cannot view justice as a forgone conclusion.
In this 45th year since the Soweto Uprising and 156th year since the end of slavery in the U.S., both South Africa and the U.S. continue to grapple with rampant police violence against Black people and people of colour. Black students in both countries are still calling for equal, decolonised education. And our global health systems continue to concentrate COVID-19 vaccines in the hands of wealthy industrialized nations and ignore the needs of people of colour, particularly those living in the global south.
These are huge challenges. But at AFRE, we are finding hope and resolve in our Fellows and other advocates whose efforts are meeting the needs of our moment:
Axolile Notywala ’20 is speaking out powerfully about the gun violence crisis in Cape Town.
Jitu Brown ’19 is hosting listening sessions toward the creation of a federal quality of life agenda for people of colour across the U.S.
Zakiyah Ansari ’20, Joel Modiri ’18, Bongiwe Lusizi ’19, and Khwezi Mabasa’20 are each working in different ways to open access to decolonised education.
Rasheedah Phillips ’18 is building a coalition of tenant organisers in Philadelphia to change the city’s discriminatory eviction practices.
And that’s not all. Other Atlantic Fellows are leading campaigns to reclaim land rights, and to open access to clean water and energy access in rural South Africa. Others are mobilising for access to an affordable internet, one that is grounded in values of curiosity, creativity and community rather than surveillance and capitalist interests.
Each effort holds its unique place in the fight for racial equity. Indeed, we are confident that the work of all of our Fellows and their peers in this generation will bend the arc of the moral universe more speedily towards justice.
We are grateful to journey alongside them.
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