Juneteenth calls us to remember emancipation from the brutality of slavery and the long delay between the promise of freedom and its realization.

It is a day for honest reckoning and joy.

But I must admit, there are days I feel genuinely discouraged. Because so much of what is happening right now feels like reactionary backlash, like the period that followed the last emancipation, the period we call Jim Crow.

Backlash shows up in the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling that gutted Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and within days, Southern states were redrawing maps to dilute black political power.

It shows up in a rising strain of thinking, amplified by figures with real power in Washington, that openly questions whether women should vote at all, reviving “household voting” arguments used for generations to keep women and people of color from the ballot.

It shows up in a refugee policy that fast-tracked white Afrikaners into the United States while families fleeing conflict in Sudan, Haiti and Congo remain frozen out of the same program.

It is proclaimed in the National Security Strategy that warns Europe will be “unrecognizable” because of immigration and Vice President J.D. Vance’s lecture to NATO that that their greatest security threat is not Russia, but too many non-European immigrants.

It shows up in our military, where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth personally struck black and female officers from promotion lists, while President Donald Trump fired Air Force Gen. C.Q. Brown Jr., the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Hegseth fired Navy Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to serve as chief of naval operations — with no explanation given in either case.

It shows up at U.S. Military Academy West Point, where Hegseth’s orders triggered what a resigning professor called “a sweeping assault on the school’s curriculum,” leaving courses canceled, syllabi gutted, clubs for women and students of color shut down, readings by Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison pulled.

At the U.S. Naval Academy, nearly 400 books were pulled, including Maya Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Holocaust histories; and accounts of black Americans who served in World War II.

When officers in training can no longer read these acclaimed works, we aren’t talking curriculum reform. We are talking erasure.

It shows up in the executive order that placed the National Museum of African American History & Culture under review for “divisive ideology,” forced out its director, and put its slavery exhibit under scrutiny, all while the nation prepares its 250th birthday celebration.

The National Park Service rewrote the Underground Railroad webpage to erase Harriet Tubman’s photo and records until public outrage forced a reversal.

The Pentagon scrubbed the Tuskegee Airmen from U.S. Air Force training and briefly pulled Jackie Robinson’s military record from government websites.

The pattern is unmistakable: when your lived experience doesn’t fit the Trump administration’s gilded portrait of America, it gets labeled un-American.

But that is precisely the sin Juneteenth calls us to name. Because what this holiday has always honored — what could not be owned, could not be erased, could not be legislated away — is the truth of real people’s lives.

The people who were bought and sold. Who built this country with their hands and were denied its promises. Who kept their humanity, their joy, their faith, intact against every effort to extinguish it.

Their story is not divisive. It is the most American story there is. And a country that calls it otherwise isn’t protecting its history. It’s hiding from it.

That’s where I find my hope, because black Americans have already shown this country how to hold that truth and keep going anyway.

UC Santa Barbara historian Daina Ramey Berry has spent her career searching incomplete slave-era records for what she calls “soul value” or the worth enslaved people understood themselves to possess, beyond any price an enslaver could name.

That value showed up in a mother’s love, in community, in music, in worship, in beauty created under unimaginable cruelty.

That kind of soul lives in the music of Pulitzer Prize-winning, MacArthur Fellow, and two-time Grammy Award-winning singer, multi-instrumentalist, composer Rhiannon Giddens (and I say that with particular closeness, because my stepson plays alongside her).

Her album Freedom Highway opens with a song called “At the Purchaser’s Option.” Giddens found a 1797 newspaper advertisement featuring a 22-year-old enslaved woman for sale, with a note at the bottom: her 9-month-old baby was also available “at the purchaser’s option.” Whether that mother kept her child depended on a stranger’s whim.

Giddens entered that woman’s soul and wrote her a voice. The refrain she gave her across the centuries is a declaration that even slavery could not reach the deepest part of her: you can take my blood, but not my soul.

That is soul value. And that is the thing that was never for sale.

Slavery never possessed the entirety of black life. People kept loving each other, building families and churches and joy in the middle of horror and that joy was never denial.

It was resilience. It is what carried people toward freedom, and what carried this country, again and again, toward becoming more truly itself.

That is the legacy of the black church, of Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Ella Baker, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, people who understood that real faith expands democracy rather than shrinking it.

It stands in stark contrast to a movement today that wraps domination in religious language, quotes scripture while banning books, claims faith while turning its back on the hungry, the sick, the stranger.

One tradition calls us to see God in every human being. The other sees only hierarchy. The difference could not be sharper.

Freedom was never just the absence of chains. It is the ability to live fully to belong, to create, to celebrate, to insist on your own humanity even when the law denies it.

That is what black Americans modeled for this entire country, under conditions most of us will never face. If they could build that kind of joy and resolve then, we have no excuse for despair now.

Our future won’t be secured by laws alone. It will be secured by people who refuse to let cruelty have the last word, who choose connection, who choose joy, who keep showing up for each other.

That is the relentless practice of belonging. That is the work. And on this Juneteenth, I believe we are still capable of it.