June 19, 2025
By Marc Stier and Erica Freeman
Juneteenth is a day of celebration that marks the end of slavery in America. But it should also be a time of reflection about white supremacy’s continued presence and the way it affects our country.
This year, it’s virtually impossible to ignore the resurgence of explicit and unabashed racism in America, which is a major force in the MAGA movement and the steps the current administration has been taking to roll back efforts to diminish the role of white supremacy in the United States.
While we celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation, we all know that white supremacy didn’t end with slavery.
Today, forced, unpaid Black labor hasn’t ended as contemporary mass incarceration, including chain gangs in some states, forces Black people to engage in unfree labor for meager wages, as did the sharecropping system post-slavery. And these abuses of the criminal justice system continue to separate Black families for decades or even permanently just as slavery did.
And long after the end of slavery and to this present day, segregation in both the South and North has stood in the way of Black educational, social, and economic progress. Although de jure segregation based in the legal system was overthrown in the courts, de facto segregation based on custom and policy has continued. Today, most Northern cities are as segregated as they have ever been. Racist laws and practices have continued and, in many cases, have deepened segregation throughout our country.
In the not-too-distant past, redlining practices in most of our cities made it impossible for Black people to secure mortgages to buy homes, depriving them of a primary source of working and middle-class wealth creation. When federally funded highways and new school buildings led many businesses to leave our cities, Black people couldn’t follow the jobs to the suburbs because of racist property covenants and zoning codes that limited low- and moderate-income housing. As businesses and middle-class white people fled the city, urban tax bases were undermined, which led to service cuts, especially for K–12 education, which disproportionately hurt Black and low-income neighborhoods. Urban renewal and highway programs pushed Black people even further into increasingly segregated, low-income neighborhoods that suffered public and private disinvestment. And state policies shifted school funding away from majority-Black districts. The result is that, even now, young people growing up in many distressed, majority-Black neighborhoods are cut off from good schools and the dynamic part of our economy, perpetuating poverty.
It’s true that in recent decades we have seen small steps taken to rectify these ills.
Some of those steps involve policies to change the socio-economic conditions that perpetuate Black poverty. They include community development policies and the redistribution of funding to aid historically underfunded schools, a policy goal adopted by the state of Pennsylvania last year with the embrace of a new adequacy formula for funding our schools.
Some involve attention to the way, whether intentional or not, public policies continue to discriminate against Black people by denying them the benefits, recognition, and advancement that they deserve. We have examples of such policies in Pennsylvania, such as the distribution of the federal support for emergency rental and school assistance during the pandemic.
Some of these policies included efforts to make our universities, businesses, and professions more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. This work broadened the criteria we use for admissions and hiring, adjusting policies that were working against Black people and ensuring that people who still carried racist ideas were not allowed to treat people inequitably.
After centuries of racist policies, practices, and attitudes, which continue to reduce the life opportunities of Black people, these were very small steps to overcome the tragic and deadly legacy of white supremacy. Indeed, our analysis of public policies in Pennsylvania and its cities shows that we have done far too little, especially in fully and fairly funding education and investing in anti-poverty programs. As a result, the impact of racism in the lives of Black and white people remains ever-present.
Yet these small steps forward and, it appears, the election of a Black president, were still too much for a slight majority of the American people. Since the 2016 presidential election, we’ve seen a growing political movement that is incapable of recognizing the continued impact of white supremacy on our society and the necessity of continuing to take steps to eliminate its impact on our politics, culture, and economy. Instead, every one of the steps forward have been met with cries of “reverse racism,” especially in recent months.
Those cries are, in every possible way, false. Yet they’re embraced by one too many Americans who are unwilling to grapple with our history and its continuing impact on our lives. The result is that the current administration has taken steps to undermine many of the small steps mentioned above:
- It has banned diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in the federal government and in any business or university that has contracts with or receives grants from the government. This affects a huge swath of our economy.
- It has even rescinded grants to do research on the medical issues faced by Black people, specifically, after decades of neglect. A federal judge recently ruled against this decision saying “he’s never seen government racial discrimination like this” during 40 years on the bench.
- It has rolled back programs to reduce injustice in policing in Black communities.
- It has rolled back support for historically Black colleges and universities.
- It is trying to make it impossible to raise challenges to employment and other policies based on their “disparate impact” on Black people. This will, among other things, throttle federal and state investigations of racism in employment, voting, school practices (such as dress codes banning certain hair styles worn by Black people), and many other matters.
- It has banned “DEI” books from the US Naval Academy Library and other government institutions and encouraged similar actions across the state, making free discussion of issues of white supremacy and racism more difficult.
- It has systematically erased biographies and documents about the historic actions and impact of prominent Black people, including Jackie Robinson and Harriet Tubman, as well as Black military history from government websites, seeking to diminish efforts to recognize their contributions to our society.
- It is purging the military of high-ranking Black officers and replacing them with far less qualified officers.
- It is reinstating names of US military bases and forts to those of officers of the confederacy, traitors who fought on behalf of slavery.
- It has, without reason or evidence, blamed a midair collision on DEI programs.
- It has issued an executive order that bans the teaching of “critical race theory” in K–12 schools. Never mind that this theory has never been taught in our schools—the definition of it in the executive order will discourage teaching about slavery, Jim Crow, and civil rights.
These and other actions are designed to end programs that reduce the impact of structural racism on the lives of Black people and that undermine our country’s effort to tell the truth about the role of white supremacy in our history. And the administration’s continued attack on the small and insufficient efforts to reduce the impact of those efforts on the lives of Black people is a racist attempt to stoke and exacerbate racism in the white majority.
So, on this day, as we set aside some time and space to celebrate a shining moment in our past, we’re also compelled to bemoan the MAGA movement’s efforts to deny our past, undermine our present efforts to diminish the impact of white supremacy on our lives, and sacrifice the bright future we might have achieved sooner rather than later as a multi-racial democratic society to the political expediency that comes with stoking racism.
This is a time for those of us who are ashamed of the current situation in our country to join together in a renewed effort to return to the path of racial progress.