As we mark another Juneteenth—a holiday commemorating the delayed freedom of enslaved Black people in the U.S.—we must confront a bitter truth: freedom delayed is still freedom denied. From the blood-soaked soil of Sudan to the razed streets of Gaza, from the mineral mines of Congo to the nuclear threats made by Israel toward Iran, the machinery of Empire continues to grind down the bodies and dreams of the oppressed. And at the heart of that machinery sits the United States and its military-industrial complex—a system that has never stopped waging war against Black, Brown, and Indigenous life, at home and abroad.
The same week we celebrate emancipation, communities across the U.S. brace for renewed ICE raids—state-sanctioned kidnappings that terrorize migrant families in the night. Black migrants are disproportionately targeted, caged in detention centers built by private prison corporations that profit from anti-Blackness. Juneteenth in this context is not just a historical commemoration—it is a living indictment of a state that still profits from captivity.
We also approach the solemn anniversaries of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and too many others murdered by police. Their names are not symbols. They are stories of stolen futures, made possible by a domestic security apparatus shaped by global militarism. Many U.S. police departments—including those in Minneapolis and Louisville—have participated in training exchanges with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). These programs teach American officers military tactics, surveillance techniques, and methods of population control designed for an occupying army. And they bring those tactics home—to our streets, our schools, our communities.
Angela Davis reminds us that “freedom is a constant struggle.” Not a moment, but a continuum. The abolition of chattel slavery in 1865 did not end the afterlife of slavery—it evolved into policing, incarceration, deportation, and empire. The U.S. police state and the U.S. war machine are two faces of the same coin. The same tear gas used on Black protesters in Ferguson was tested on Palestinians in Gaza. The same defense contractors that cage children at the border profit from bombing Yemen, surveilling Sudan, and enabling Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Audre Lorde taught us that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Liberation cannot come from within the systems designed to suppress it. Juneteenth must be more than a federally recognized day off or symbolic performance. It must be a portal—a call to decolonize not just America, but the global systems of power that reproduce Black death, Indigenous erasure, and climate collapse.
June Jordan, in her poem Moving Towards Home, refused to accept the framing of Palestinian struggle as separate from Black liberation. “I was born a Black woman / and now / I am become a Palestinian,” she wrote. Her solidarity was not metaphorical; it was material. To be Black and free in this world requires that we do not look away from Gaza, from Congo, from Sudan. These are not “foreign conflicts”—they are intimately connected to the global economy of extraction and control. Our suffering is linked. So is our liberation.
And still—Black joy endures. It dances. It sings. It resists. Octavia Butler warned us that the future will not be given; it must be imagined and shaped through collective struggle. “All that you touch / You change,” she wrote. “All that you change / Changes you.” Black joy is not escapism. It is strategy. It is the spiritual and cultural technology of survival—a defiant, radiant refusal to die.
As we gather on Juneteenth, let us not be seduced by sanitized stories of emancipation. Let us remember that true freedom requires us to stand with all oppressed people—across borders, languages, and time zones. From Gaza to Congo, from the plantation to the prison, from ICE raids to IDF-trained police killings—the fight is the same. The tools of empire are global. But so too are our dreams.
This Juneteenth, may we carry our joy as a weapon. May we wield our solidarity as strategy. And may we finally, fully, break every chain.