A Holiday is NOT Justice: A Restorative Read on Juneteenth
By David Ryan Barcega Castro Harris. All five names for all the ancestors.
Juneteenth marks the 1865 day (June 19) that a Union general rode into Galveston, Texas, and announced that the people enslaved there were free. But the Emancipation Proclamation had said the same thing two and a half years earlier. Word, and more to the point enforcement, took that long to arrive. The people who learned they were free that day had spent thirty extra months in bondage after the document that supposedly freed them, because nobody with the power to enforce it showed up to make it real.
In 2021, after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd and the largest protests in the country's history filled the streets, Congress made Juneteenth a federal holiday. The same body that has refused for more than three decades to even study reparations managed to give the country a day off.
I don't want a holiday. I want justice.
A holiday is what a country hands you when it wants credit for naming a harm without real accountability. A gift that an abuser gives you without changing their behavior. I am not rejecting history, memory, or PTO. I am rejecting those things as a substitute for real repair.
What Happened?
For roughly two and a half centuries, chattel slavery in the land that became the United States treated human beings as property that could be bought, bred, worked, mortgaged, and inherited. By 1860 close to four million people were enslaved here. Their labor built the wealth of the South and fed the banks, insurers, shipping firms, and universities of the North.
When the Civil War ended, the country had a real chance to begin repair and turned away from it on purpose. In January 1865 General Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, setting aside confiscated coastal land for freed families in roughly forty-acre plots. That is where "forty acres and a mule" comes from. It was an order, not a slogan. Within months President Andrew Johnson reversed it and gave the land back to the people who had enslaved the families now living on it.
The one time the federal government did pay money over slavery, it paid the wrong people. The District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862 freed about three thousand enslaved people in the capital and paid their enslavers up to three hundred dollars for each person they were forced to release. It’s not that this country won’t cut checks over the harms created by chattel slavery. It just writes those checks to enslavers.
The Harm Didn't Stop. It Transformed.
Some people want the story to stop at 1865 because a harm with an end date is a harm you can decline to pay for. But harm didn’t stop, it transformed.
For a brief window after the war, Reconstruction put Black political power on the map. Black men voted, held office, built schools. Then it was deliberately taken apart. Federal troops withdrew in 1877 as part of a political deal, and white Southern governments spent the next decades systematically stripping away everything Reconstruction had built.
The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery "except as a punishment for crime," and Southern states read that clause as an instruction. Convict leasing arrested Black men on invented charges and sold their labor to the same plantations and mines that had previously “owned” them, often under conditions worse than slavery, because a leased man could be worked to death and simply replaced.
For a brief window after the war, Reconstruction put Black political power on the map. Black men voted, held office, built schools. Then it was deliberately taken apart. Federal troops withdrew in 1877 as part of a political deal, and white Southern governments spent the next decades systematically stripping away everything Reconstruction had built.
Then came Black Codes that criminalized Black life directly. Jim Crow built segregation into law for the better part of a century. Even where those laws didn't exist formally in the North anti-blackness was still the norm.
When the New Deal and the GI Bill built the American middle class, Black families were shut out of the home loans and college funding that built white wealth, not by accident but through administration. The federal government's own housing agencies drew the redlining maps that decided which neighborhoods received investment and which were starved of it, and Black neighborhoods were starved by design. Urban renewal then bulldozed Black neighborhoods that had managed to build anything, and called it progress.
The police, the same institution that returned escaped enslaved people, enforced Black Codes, protected lynch mobs, and the work of controlling Black movement and Black bodies through stop and frisk, traffic stops, no-knock raids, and the killings that still put names in the news. Mass incarceration completed the loop, building the largest prison population on earth, disproportionately Black, much of it doing labor for pennies under that same constitutional exception.
The impact of all of this is visible everyday. The median white household in this country holds roughly six times the wealth of the median Black household. Black Americans die earlier, are denied care more often, and are policed more heavily. The cause of that gap is not a mystery and it is not a moral failing of the Black people. It’s what happens when a country made up of institutions run by people refuses to take real accountability.
The Harm is Active Now.
The harm isn’t just historical. It’s happening now. This administration’s blatant attempts to erase history is harmful in and of itself. Erasing the record makes the debt impossible to name and therefore impossible to collect.
On day one, the current administration rescinded the 1965 order requiring federal contractors to pursue equal opportunity, closed the government's equity offices, and created a climate in which Amazon, Boeing, Ford, McDonald's, Meta, Target, and Walmart all walked back the commitments they made in 2020.
The administration's "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History" executive order has put the National Museum of African American History and Culture under review with the intent to replace “divisive language with unifying narratives”.
Across more than a dozen states, laws restrict teaching about “Critical Race Theory”, systemic racism, or the ongoing effects of slavery. Florida grotesquely adopted African American history standards instructing schools to teach that some enslaved people benefited from slavery because it taught them useful skills.
A country actively working to make a harm harder to see is not standing still on repair. It is deepening the harm.
What We've Been Offered Instead.
Set the active harms aside and look at what the country has actually put on the table as acknowledgment, because some of it is real and worth honoring even though it falls short of meaningful repair.
The performative gestures came at a real cost and meant something. People fought for Black History Month, MLK day, for the museum on the National Mall, for Juneteenth itself. Visibility, representation, and memory do matter. A child who can walk into the National Museum of African American History and Culture and see the whole arc of it carries something a child without that does not. I won’t brush those wins off as nothing. They are simply not repair.
The Senate's 2009 apology included an:
(1) Apology for the enslavement and segregation of African-Americans.--The Congress--
(A) acknowledges the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow laws;
(B) apologizes to African Americans on behalf of the people of the United States, for the wrongs committed against them and their ancestors who suffered under slavery and Jim Crow laws.
But also included a disclaimer stating that nothing in this resolution authorizes or supports any claim against the United States, the legal route any reparations claim would have to take.
The genuine attempts at repair have run into walls. California convened the first statewide reparations task force, which did serious work and delivered a final report in 2023 with more than a hundred recommendations. In 2025 the state created a Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery to carry the work forward, but the proposals for direct payments stalled in the legislature.
At the federal level, HR 40, a bill that would only create a commission to study reparations, has been introduced every single year since 1989 and has never once reached a floor vote. Ayanna Pressley and Cory Booker reintroduced it again in 2025, into a Congress that will not move it.
All of these are well intentioned attempts at meeting SOME of the needs of people harmed by the legacy of chattel slavery. But they all come from Black people and allies, doing their best to ask for meaningful repair. The country has continuously refused accountability.
A Restorative Solution Requires Different Questions.
The legal system asks what law was broken, who broke it, and what punishment they deserve. Slavery was legal. Restorative Justice asks a set of questions that make the “powers that be” uncomfortable. Restorative Justice asks who was harmed, what are the needs created by that harm, and whose responsibility it is to meet that need.
What happened is not a single event. As demonstrated above, chattel slavery and the chain of systems built to keep extracting from Black people have created enormous harm. Any honest answer to this question has to hold the systems accountable, not just the long dead perpetrators of harm.
Who was harmed, and how. The primary claim belongs to the descendants of people enslaved in the United States. That debt is specific. It was promised and never paid. There are complications to that because like me, most Black Americans who are the descendants of formerly enslaved people can’t trace their lineage to a documented enslaved ancestor. Furthermore, the systems stemming from slavery, the redlining, the policing, and the wealth extraction, harm every Black person living in this country now, a century and a half later, whether or not their specific ancestors were enslaved here.
This country will have to build an honest process for answering who is owed repair. What it cannot do is use the difficulty of that question as a reason to do nothing.
What is needed is what every real process of repair needs. Truth, told publicly and completely instead of edited for comfort. Acknowledgment that names what was done and who did it. Material repair large enough to matter. And a credible assurance that it will not happen again, which is exactly what the current erasure campaign is destroying.
Who is Responsible for What?
Responsibility for repair does not rest on a single person or institution. Different actors owe different things. The optimistic version of this is the one where each of them actually does their part.
Descendants of people who enslaved others can make repair directly to the descendants of the people their families enslaved. This is not abstract. Families hold the records: names, plantation ledgers, wills that list human beings as property alongside the furniture. Where that line can be traced, it can be honored, with money, with land, with whatever the harmed family actually needs and asks for.
It has already happened. In Georgia, Sarah Eisner, a descendant of enslaver George Adam Keller, reached out to Randy Quarterman, a descendant of Zeike Quarterman, the man her ancestor had enslaved. Together they founded the Quarterman and Keller Fund to preserve land Keller had given Zeike's family after emancipation and to fund Black education and land preservation in coastal Georgia. That is what direct repair looks like at the scale of two families: specific people, a specific debt, specific action.
Institutions owe the communities they extracted from. In 2019, Virginia Theological Seminary acknowledged that enslaved people worked its campus and that the seminary continued under Jim Crow afterward. To repair it set aside a reparations endowment, now grown to $2.8 million, to make annual cash payments in perpetuity to identified direct descendants. The endowment is a part of the Seminary’s commitment to recognizing its participation in oppression in the past and commitment to healing and making amends in the future. Additional funds have been allocated to support the work of Black congregations that have historical ties to the Seminary; to create programs that promote justice and inclusion; and to elevate the work and voices of Black alumni and clergy within The Episcopal Church.
As of 2025, more than two hundred descendants had received checks. Universities built on bonded labor, banks and insurers that underwrote slavery, churches that blessed it, and the lenders that later redlined specific neighborhoods all have the same option in front of them.
The government's obligation is the largest, because the government did not merely permit the harm. It built and enforced the architecture every other actor operated inside. Its repair is measured in policy.
Reallocate resources toward the Black communities it spent more than a century starving.
Fund scholarships for black students, give advancement opportunities for Black professionals, and direct investment in Black-owned businesses.
Teach accurate history instead of the Florida version.
Rewrite tax law so it redistributes the wealth.
- Strike down racist laws:
The Thirteenth Amendment's exception clause that still permits forced labor in prisons.
Mandatory minimums and the crack-versus-powder sentencing gap that filled those prisons.
Voter ID regimes that thin Black turnout by design.
"It's about more than money" has become the most common way people talk themselves out of the money. Land, wealth, health, and safety were taken in measurable amounts, and they can be returned in measurable amounts. At the same time, a check alone will not change the conditions that produced the harm, and if the country pays and then rebuilds the same systems, the repair will not hold. The material repair and the structural repair are the same project. Neither one finishes the job by itself.
What is Realistic Right Now?
None of this is unprecedented, which is the first thing to say to anyone who calls it impossible. The United States already paid reparations to Japanese Americans it incarcerated during World War II, twenty thousand dollars to each surviving person with a formal apology, under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Germany has paid Holocaust survivors for decades. The country and the world know how to do this. The barrier is not capability. It is will.
And the will, right now, is not there at the scale the harm requires. Federally, nothing is moving, and the current administration is hostile to the premise. Most Black Americans support reparations. Most white, Latino, and Asian Americans, when surveyed, do not. Where repair programs exist, they get sued.
So what is actually moving is local and even those efforts are contested.
Evanston, Illinois, built the first publicly funded municipal reparations program, paying twenty-five thousand dollars toward housing to Black residents and descendants who lived there during the decades of legal housing discrimination, funded by cannabis and real estate transfer taxes. It has distributed millions while defending itself in federal court against a conservative group arguing that race-based eligibility is unconstitutional. I do not read Evanston as a hollow gesture. I read it as people doing what they could inside the scope they had. It is a worthy attempt, and it still falls short of the scale of the harm, which is exactly the gap between what is realistic and what would be just.
California's new Bureau is a structure that could move real repair if the political will existed to fund it. Cities, universities, and churches are running their own accountings. Not one national act, but a thousand local ones, each fought over, each a precedent the next one can point to.
What You Can Do?
What you can do with all of this looks different depending who you are at the intersection of your race and identity. The honest first step is to sit with that question rather than reach for a single tidy answer.
The answer is not a scripted list, its more nuanced than that, but it’s the work we’ll reflect on together in the Reparations & Restorative Justice [click to register] workshop this Juneteenth. Not a bad way to spend your day off.
America has never healed from our past because we’ve never fully reconciled with the restorative process questions in this context.
We know what's happened and who was harmed. We know what was taken and who's responsible.
I don't want a holiday. I want justice.