129. What's your relationship to Juneteenth?

Here’s this week’s letter:
I got the day off for Juneteenth and I’m trying to think about ways to honor the holiday and incorporate it into my family’s annual traditions. We have a nice tradition in my family of volunteering on Thanksgiving, we love it, it’s fun, it brings the family together, it reminds us to practice gratitude. We usually spend some time that weekend learning more about Native American history as a family and that has felt right for my family. What can we do for Juneteenth to honor the magnitude of this day?

https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/historical-legacy-juneteenth#:~:text=Freedom%20finally%20came%20on%20June,newly%20freed%20people%20in%20Texas.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/884989263 

Transcript

Here’s this week’s letter:
I got the day off for Juneteenth and I’m trying to think about ways to honor the holiday and incorporate it into my family’s annual traditions. We have a nice tradition in my family of volunteering on Thanksgiving, we love it, it’s fun, it brings the family together, it reminds us to practice gratitude. We usually spend some time that weekend learning more about Native American history as a family and that has felt right for my family. What can we do for Juneteenth to honor the magnitude of this day?

Thanks for your letter. Before I offer some thoughts on honoring the day, I’ll encourage you to do your own research to understand the history and meaning of the day. And really look around at multiple sources. There’s a tendency to gloss over some of our ugliest aspects of our country and an inability to hold painful truths alongside gratitude for our progress. Our best self is one where we can acknowledge where we started, work to improve, and continually check for successes and failures as we evolve. I think your family’s participation in Juneteenth can be a part of how your family does this.

Let’s start with education. When I think about the potential of Juneteenth, the first thing I think of is the potential for education. I’d encourage you to think about your family’s specific relationship to the enslavement of Africans in this country. Were your family members enslaved? Were they enslavers? Do you live on a former forced labor camp? I guess they call those plantations in a lot of places. What’s the truth behind your family’s relationship to the enslavement of kidnapped Africans in America? Are you recent Americans like my family? Maybe you showed up here after the Emancipation Proclamation in the 1800s. Did your family benefit from the anti-Black policies that lingered after slavery? Did your family work in careers where Black people were not allowed the same government protections or benefits? Did your family work in agriculture for example? Did your family buy a home in a redlined area? Has your family benefited from anti-blackness? Exploring your family’s relationship to slavery in America could be one way that you honor Juneteenth in your family.

Let’s talk about celebration. Depending on your relationship to slavery in America, you can be thoughtful about how to celebrate? Are you celebrating your ancestors' survival? Are you celebrating Black joy? Are you celebrating African American culture and history?

And finally, let’s talk about activism. What can you do to be on the side of progress? There’s so much! Find out what the Black activists in your neighborhood are talking about. What do they need? How can you help? Can you advocate for truthful teaching of our history? Can you advocate for reparations? This is a money show, so there’s the first recommendation which is to look for your role in advancing reparations! Other potential areas for advocacy that you might consider include include voting rights and police and criminal justice reform. There are so many advocacy areas, pick the ones that make sense for your family.

In fact, you might put your advocacy efforts towards really ending slavery in America. The 13th Amendment didn’t end enslavement for all Americans. The law very specifically carves out an exception to continue slavery and involuntary servitude for people who have been convicited of a crime. And so today, there is a very quiet multi-Billion dollar prison labor industry in America.

I’m going to link an interview on NPR with a formerly incarcerated person who was working over 12 hours a day for about 18 cents an hour in prison. They worked over 12 hours a day for about $54 a month. Most of that money was used to make phone calls, or to buy a stick of deodorant. A bag of chips at the canteen was about $5, two days worth of pay. These services were sold by companies who split the profit with the prison. If a prisoner refuses to work, they are punished, they can be transferred to a more dangerous unit, or put into solitary confinement. There are no sick days. No days off. Advocating for better working conditions also leads to punishment.

And incarcerated people are doing all sorts of forced labor. They build office furniture, they do laundry for universities. The biggest party supply store in the US, Oriental Trading Company hires prisoners to do labor. In the interview I’m linking, the formerly incarcerated person says they were getting paid about 37 cents an hour after deductions were taken out to pay for their room and board in prison. Their job was to cut plastic for Oriental Trading and they did that for about 10 years. After being released from prison, this formerly incarcerated person went to Oriental Trading Company to apply for their old job, except now as a free person, and was told that they don’t hire felons.

So this is a perfect example of an advocacy area your family could pick up as a part of honoring Juneteenth. The holiday is about ending slavery, so let’s really end it.

So those are a bunch of thoughts on how you might think about folding Juneteenth into your family’s traditions.

On this show we focus on how we can align our money and our values. So let’s pull out the money nuggets from today’s episode. All the places where money and our values explicitly intersect. We talked about reparations. We talked about prison labor. And we also talked about anti-Black financial barriers that have benefited non-Black people in America.

Money has a way of showing up in almost every aspect of our national conversations. This month is Pride month and as we look around at rainbow capitalism and how it can feel at times like it has surpassed the deeper conversations about queer liberation, I think we have an opportunity to think about how we can avoid this same fate with Juneteenth. So thank you for the letter this week, would love to hear how you end up incorporating Juneteenth into your family’s traditions, please do write back with a follow up.

Thanks for joining for today’s discussion. This was an especially deep one and it took a lot of time to research and put together. I really hope something you heard today kickstarted some thoughts on how you might think about your money and how it lines up with your values and also about our money as a society and how it lines up with our collective values. If you found it interesting, please share an episode with someone you think might find it interesting. If you’ve been thinking about another topic related to how we can align our money and our values, please send it over.