This month, workers in the U.S. will be reminded that the bosses’ racist system of chattel slavery officially ended in 1865 — but racist attacks and slavery continue today in other forms. The following is a reprint of a Challenge article originally published June 29, 2018, titled “Juneteenth Perpetuates Racist Myth” — published three years before racist crime bill architect Joe Biden signed it into law as an official federal holiday.

June 19, or “Juneteenth,” commemorates the end of chattel slavery. Juneteenth has been pushed on the working class with the sponsorship of major banks like Wells Fargo. Juneteenth perpetuates many racist myths about the U.S., including the myth that the images we’re given of Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama supposedly represent the ‘real’ U.S., and Donald Trump is something different.  

While the bosses promote their bank-sponsored Juneteenth holiday, they obscure the fact that racism and slavery never truly ended — and just as deliberately, they erase the long history of anti-racist struggle waged by Black and white workers together. These same bosses keep racism alive and entrenched in the 21st century, using it to divide Black workers from white workers, and to condition the U.S. working class to accept the bigger and deadlier wars already taking shape on the horizon.

Origins of Juneteenth

Two years before June 19, 1865 came Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which excluded slave states that were not in rebellion against the Union – Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, and Missouri – and Texas, which was not a battleground. Many planters and other slaveholders moved to Texas with over 150,000 slaves in order to escape the raging Civil War. In June, 1865, after the surrender of General Robert E. Lee and the Union victory in New Orleans, word finally came to Galveston, Texas that the slaves were free. The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, officially ending slavery throughout the country, was not passed until December, 1865.

Abraham Lincoln, the so-called “Great Emancipator” of slaves, was no believer in the equality of Black workers. His main motive for fighting the Civil War was preservation of the unity of the United States, not abolishing slavery. In 1858, Lincoln said, “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races…”

Lincoln favored setting up colonies for Black former slaves in Africa and Central America, and requested funds from Congress to deport freed slaves.

Another history we do not learn about or celebrate is that of the multitude of rebellions against slavery, many of them multiracial, from the 1600s to the 1800s.  In their book The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker document many of these. Among them are:

• The Barbados rebellions in 1649, which united Irish and African slaves;
• Bacon’s rebellion in Virginia in 1676, which united slaves and white indentured servants;
• The ‘New York City Conspiracy’ of 1741, which united African workers, white indentured servants, sailors, and Irish immigrants;
• Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831;
• John Brown’s multiracial antislavery campaign culminating at Harper’s Ferry.  
• The most successful was the Haitian rebellion, which abolished slavery and colonization on that island by 1804.

Racism never ended

At the end of the Civil War, freed slaves became wage laborers on former plantations, sharecroppers, or domestic workers. For a short time, their well-being was protected by federal troops during Reconstruction from 1865-77. Once this protection was withdrawn, white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan flourished, often made up of local law enforcement. This Jim Crow era was characterized by the open murder of thousands of Black workers, rampant imprisonment, impoverishment and indebtedness of former slaves and total segregation. 

Although many of these abuses were gradually mitigated through the Great Migration of Black workers to the North, landmark court decisions, and ultimately the Civil Rights Movement, racism has continued to flourish in all parts of the United States. Today, there are five times more workers trapped in modern slavery — through sex trafficking, forced prison labor, forced marriage, labor camps, and domestic servitude via the kafala system — than there were Black workers enslaved under chattel slavery in the 19th century (ILO, Walk Free Foundation, and the International Organization for Migration, Global Estimates of Modern Slavery, 2022). Racial wage differentials between white men and Black and Latino workers amount to nearly $800 billion a year, approaching half of total annual corporate profits. Disparities in social spending on education, health care, and housing add hundreds of billions more to that toll. The conclusion is inescapable: U.S. capitalism could not survive without racism. 

Black workers continue to be incarcerated at five times the rate of white workers and are killed by police at a sharply disproportionate rate — at roughly two to three times the frequency of white workers, despite comprising just 13 percent of the population. Officers are almost never convicted for the killing of Black workers. Schools, hospitals, and neighborhoods remain as segregated today as they were fifty years ago. And just as under Jim Crow, migrant workers are routinely rounded up, deported, or imprisoned in detention camps — where adults are compelled to perform forced labor for as little as one dollar a day, and children have been held in metal cages, separated from their parents. As of mid-2018, the federal government had separated and detained more than 2,000 children, housing many of them in chain-link enclosures in temporary border facilities; in total, more than 5,400 children were ultimately torn from their families under the zero-tolerance policy (Southern Poverty Law Center, Family Separation: A Timeline, 2019; Susan Terrio, Whose Child Am I?, UC Press, 2020). These racist attacks have flourished under both Democrats and Republicans alike.

All workers are hurt by racism

Other ideas pushed on workers today include “white privilege”, as if white workers created racism, benefitted from it, or should be paralyzed or separate themselves because of guilt. While many white workers may temporarily hold racist views, anti-Black racism was purposely and methodically created by the U.S. bosses of the 1600-1700s to justify slavery and separate white indentured servants and poor farmers from Black slaves. Before that, there had been social mixing and intermarriage between whites and non-whites.

What the ruling class fears is us recognizing that the lowered standards and super-exploitation for one sector of the working class brings down the standards for all sectors.

Racism serves capitalism well to maximize profits and minimize rebellion. Separation into different schools, neighborhoods, job titles, unions, and neighborhoods keeps us divided when only multiracial mass action would enable us to fight back effectively. U.S. rulers also rely on racism to win workers, white, Black and immigrant, to fight imperialist wars for markets and resources by painting Muslim, Arab, Asian and other workers as enemies.

It is heartening to witness the mass uprising against the separation and incarceration of immigrant children, which has actually forced a minimal change in Trump’s policies. We must use this power of the unity of millions of workers to destroy this racist system once and for all and build an egalitarian worker-run society: communism.