{"id":158639,"date":"2025-06-19T18:41:23","date_gmt":"2025-06-19T22:41:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/?p=158639"},"modified":"2026-09-19T18:54:01","modified_gmt":"2026-09-19T22:54:01","slug":"juneteenth-in-the-age-of-maga","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/?p=158639","title":{"rendered":"Juneteenth in the Age of MAGA"},"content":{"rendered":"

Originally published at Pennsylvania Policy Center<\/a> on June 19, 2025.<\/em><\/p>\n

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June 19, 2025<\/p>\n

By Marc Stier<\/em> and Erica Freeman<\/em><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

While we celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation, we all know that white supremacy didn\u2019t end with slavery.<\/p>\n

Today, forced, unpaid Black labor<\/a> hasn\u2019t 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<\/a> post-slavery. And these abuses of the criminal justice system continue to  separate Black families for decades or even permanently just as slavery did.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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\u201312 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.<\/p>\n

It’s true that in recent decades we have seen small steps taken to rectify these ills.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201creverse racism,\u201d especially in recent months.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n