My employer first started treating Juneteenth as a company holiday back in 2020, back when we still believed we could “stop the spread” of the COVID-19 pandemic, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by police. Five years later, Juneteenth is a federal holiday, by virtue of the single term of Joe Biden’s presidential administration and Democratic control of Congress. But as was the case in 2020, Donald Trump is president again.

Especially today, it is a struggle to navigate the cognitive dissonance of observing as a holiday the news of emancipation finally reaching enslaved black folks in Texas when the country’s electorate willingly shackled itself to a demonstrably corrupt and incompetent felon in 2024. The year is not even half over and we’ve watched the re-segregation of our government, experienced and capable generals being fired because they are black, the return of the names of Confederate traitors to military bases, and many more indignities to combat “DEI”. Many corporations, universities, and municipalities are beating as hasty a retreat from the reckoning George Floyd’s murder was supposed to bring as they did rushing to place themselves on the right side of that moment. Even today’s Juneteenth celebrations have been much smaller than in past years because of that retreat.

A year from now, will Juneteenth even be recognized as a federal holiday anymore? What other anti-black backlash might we see in a country that so readily installed a criminal in the nation’s highest office and refuses to take any accountability for what they’ve done? Historians call the period from the end of Reconstruction through the early 20th century the nadir of racial relations in the United States. But where we find ourselves today feels like we may be well into a new nadir.