Author: Deja Bonney
2020 has been a real eye-opener for exposing all the unnoticed injustices that have taken place worldwide. In this year alone thousands of police brutality videos have been posted all over the media such as the murder of George Floyd as well as hate crimes towards minorities. As July approached, many people went to social media and said they were not going to celebrate the Fourth of July entirely because they should not celebrate a country for its independence when minorities are not free and get treated differently.
The world is trying to make up for its negligence towards the issues that pertain to our communities and giving in to the oppression. We have been celebrating the Fourth without paying attention to the history of it and how the statements our founding fathers made during this time still doesn’t include the Black and Brown community. Most of us are guilty of knowing that there is a problem and we choose to ignore it or not engage because of our own personal lives. 2020 has shown us all that there is indeed strength in numbers and if we don’t treat this time as a movement that we talk about every day, there will not be continuous change.
It isn’t our fault that we aren’t educated on holidays that pertain to our culture because what we learn in school is the white man’s perspective on history. We learn about how on Thanksgiving the Europeans gave the Native Americans food because they were less fortunate and how Christopher Columbus discovered America. The only time we talk about people who look like us from the past is when we have lessons on enslavement or Black History Month; our history should not be subjected to one month out of the entire year.
One unfortunate thing I have opened my mind to during this time is not having a clue about the holiday Juneteenth. In my years of being in school, I have never learned about Juneteenth, I had to read about what this holiday was on an Instagram post this year. Juneteenth is the official Independence day for black people, it was on June 19, 1865, when enslaved people were finally free in Texas. This is the day that Black and Brown people should be celebrating Independence, having cookouts, and firing fireworks into the air.