Critical Thought Unfiltered Podcast

Juneteenth What Changed?

Season 1 Episode 1

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 23:54

 content  type

Interview


 primary  goal

Discussion


 summary

In this episode, we explore the true history and ongoing struggles of the Black community, questioning the significance of Juneteenth and highlighting systemic issues that persist today.


 keywords

Juneteenth, systemic racism, mental slavery, education, reparations, Black community, history, social justice


 key  topics

The history and significance of Juneteenth
Systemic racism and legal inequalities
Mental slavery and societal conditioning
Impact of education and media on perceptions
Economic disparities and reparations
Community division and internal challenges


 takeaways

Juneteenth marks a date, but systemic issues persist.
Legal slavery ended, but mental slavery continues.
Education system fails to prepare for self-sufficiency.
Media and societal conditioning perpetuate stereotypes.
Economic and social inequalities remain unaddressed.


 guest  name

DC


Titles

The Hidden Truth Behind Juneteenth
Systemic Oppression and the Black Community

Chapters

00:00 Understanding Juneteenth: A Historical Perspective
01:46 The Thirteenth Amendment and Its Implications
03:32 Mental Slavery: The Ongoing Struggle
05:12 Welfare and Its Impact on the Black Community
06:45 The Role of Education in Mental Bondage
08:22 The Illusion of Progress: Are We Really Free?
10:18 The Importance of Financial Literacy
11:53 Political Representation and Its Failures
13:39 The Impact of Immigration on the Black Community
15:22 Racism and Violence: A Historical Context
16:45 The Need for Community Education and Empowerment
18:31 Reevaluating Our Identity and Heritage
20:17 Conclusion: The Path Forward

 resources

Uncle Tom's Cabin - https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Uncle+Tom%27s+Cabin
Juneteenth - History and Significance - https://www.history.com/topics/holidays/juneteenth
Systemic Racism in America - https://www.aclu.org/issues/racial-justice
Reparations for Slavery - https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/06/19/870582319/what-does-reparations-for-slavery-mean-for-america
Educational System Critique - https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/what-are-the-problems-with-americas-education-system/2021/09


 guest links

Twitter - https://twitter.com/DC
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXXXXXX


Support the show

SPEAKER_00

Welcome to the podcast, everyone. Today we're discussing Juneteenth. By the end of this video, I want you to ask yourself, why are you celebrating it? Now, for starters, I know some of you are already saying that Juneteenth, June 19th of 1865, was the day that we were free from slavery. And here we are in 2026, 161 years after we were allegedly free from slavery. I want you to think about a few things. So, one, we're gonna discuss that slavery was ended. And I beg to differ because a lot of you have not paid attention to any of the laws that came after that. So I want to direct your attention to the 13th Amendment. That amendment was not passed until December 6th of 1865. But I want you to take a look at it because many of you are not aware of what that is, and it's gonna add up once you see it. So the Thirteenth Amendment states that slavery was abolished and involuntary servitude was also abolished, except as punishment for a crime. So isn't that interesting? Are the wheels starting to turn for you now? This explains why society has overwhelmingly tried to throw our youth in jail for an extended amount of time. And when it comes to our jail time, we get more time than anyone else who commits the same crime. Two, we're supposed to be judged by our peers. Now, all you have to do is look at some of the scenarios that have taken place for the last 100 years, and you'll realize that we don't really get judged by our peers too often. And the court system does that intentionally because they don't want us sticking up for each other. But when it comes to other groups of people, they get judged by their peers. So in return, they get a lighter sentence. Doesn't matter what it is, they always get a lighter sentence. Now, going back to slavery, it would be safe to say that physical slavery has ended, but mental slavery has not. It has only increased. And to prove that to you, just look at how some of our people think about each other. Think about how anytime there's one of us that's involved in something and the news media puts a spin on everything like they always do. Look at how some of our own people think of us and how they believe every little thing that's put out by the media against our own people and how quick they are to believe it. That's mental bondage, that's mental slavery. And it's gone on for decades now. But I can say that it really increased after the Great Society Act. That was the act that pushed our own people against each other. And to be more specific, let's discuss welfare. Now, we are not the majority of welfare recipients. That goes to another community. It's not us. We do fall second. And when we discuss welfare, let's think about what they did then. You see, welfare was given to women more specifically, especially if they had a child. But if there was a man in the house, then welfare was rejected. And the government stooped so low that they would send inspectors to the homes of people who were receiving welfare, government assistance, and checking through their home to make sure that a man was not there. And if there was a man there, then they were cut off from government assistance altogether. So what took place after that? That was when black women decided that they would rely more so on the government than their own black men. So sum everything up, black men were demonized. We were cast out of the home when during the Jim Crow era, our community stuck more together because we had a common enemy. That enemy was other communities and also the government. Because let's be honest, the government really didn't want us to have any form of freedom whatsoever. And they still don't. Look at how long some of you have been voting Democrat. And where has it gotten us? We get these false promises of how things are going to change, but when they don't, it gets blamed on the Republicans for blocking it. But the Democrats never really pushed as hard as they should either. Because let's not forget, there have been a number of years where there was a Democratic president, a Democratic House of Representatives, and a Democratic Senate. So what's the problem? How come there has never been a black hate crime bill? But yet under Joe Biden, we get an Asian hate crime bill when Asians succumb to different levels of racism, blaming them for the COVID crisis. But that was only for a short amount of time. Yet, us as black people, we've been in this country for well over 400 years now. And this is what I mean when I say, why are you celebrating Juneteenth? What exactly has changed? Do we get fair representation in anything? Are we still frowned upon when we socialize with each other? Especially in jobs. Do people get angered when we take up for one another? Just like they did in slavery. They didn't want us congregating with each other. And really, they deterred us from speaking in our own native tongue. But yet when you look around, you see all these immigrants that still speak in their native tongue. That's not frowned upon. It's only frowned upon in this country when they're not able to speak English. But if you're able to speak English, nobody bothers them. But yet with our people, it was frowned upon. So now, after the fact, you have all these generations of people from our community that don't even know what our real nationality is. They give us this garbage of African American, but that's two continents. There's no nationality behind that. Africa contains, I believe, well over 60 countries, different dialects. What part of Africa are we from? And then when it comes to America, the United States is so arrogant to thinking that they're the only country on the continent that represents America. And that's not true. A lot of you don't even understand your own geography. Canada is America. Mexico is America. Panama is America. Brazil is America. Venezuela is America. Belize is America. El Salvador is America. Ecuador is America. Peru is America. But yet somehow in this false educational system that we're in, we believe that the United States is the only country represented in America. And let's go to the educational system. That's the biggest guilty party in our society that contributes to the mental slavery that we endure. So you go to their educational facilities and they don't even prepare you for anything other than working for someone else. This educational system doesn't prepare you to come up with an idea so that you can start your own business. And really, college is okay. The field is too overly saturated now. And it's been determined that if you go to a trade school, you make out better financially than you would going to a four-year college or going to college for a number of additional years to get your master's degree. So here you are in debt with the debt that would amount to maybe two mortgages on two different homes. When the person who went to trade school comes out better, they have lower fees for paying back their loan. And then in the long run, they make out better after a number of years of experience where they can actually start their own company in whatever field that it is that they went to school for. But yet, with our people, some of you are so arrogant that you believe that little piece of paper makes you better than everyone else. And it doesn't. It just means that you were more indoctrinated into this educational system, and you're paying an arm and a leg for a field that will probably not help you any if society collapsed. So those skills that you learned really aren't going to have much of an effect on society if society was forced to start over again. And you're so arrogant that you will look down at your own people, even the ones that will may ask, how did you get to that point? Or ask you anything about finances. And even though you've learned, you won't pass down that information. You act just like others from other communities looking down at your own people, thinking that you're something that's so great because you have this piece of paper that says that you completed the curriculum, but it has no stance on intelligence whatsoever. And some of the most famous millionaires and billionaires did not complete college. Some never even win. Some don't even have a high school diploma. And I believe it was John D. Rockefeller that I'm not 100% sure, but I don't believe he even went to high school or completed high school. Then you have Bill Gates who dropped out of college. You have Zuckerberg that dropped out of college, and there's so many more that have not completed college at all. So in our community, we keep pushing for going to college and get this great education so you could get a good paying job instead of being told to try to figure out what you want to do so that it's a field you can work for yourself in, and maybe consider going through a trade school so that you make out better and you give yourself more financial freedom doing so. You see, this is the mental bondage that I've been talking about. So yeah, we're not dealing with physical bondage unless you've been wrongly accused of a crime and thrown in jail, and then you're stripped of all your rights so that you can't even vote in elections. So slavery still does exist. It's just not in the same capacity it was in before. But it explains why our people are targeted to be thrown in jail to put us back in slavery. Again, what has changed since Juneteenth? Why are you celebrating it? According to the FBI stats, we are the most targeted people in hate crimes. So this country will promote that we're only 14% of the population, but yet we have to deal with as of 2024, the percentage of hate crimes directed at our community has been 53.2%. For 14% of the population? That's interesting. Now, we're not even represented fairly within the government. We have a party that claims they're all for us, and all they do is try to stab us in the back in front of our face at that and try to get you to go along with the program where you're going against your own best interests. Primary example, under the Joe Biden administration, he claimed that he was going to look out for the black population because they helped vote him in. This is 14% of the population, and 14% of the population has to vote, I believe, between 90 to 95% for a Democrat to become president. But over the years, that number has started to drop. And because that number started to drop, they tried to replace us. So Joe Biden tried to make it seem like he was so for our people by giving us Juneteenth, which means absolutely nothing when you look at all the things that we went through and we still go through. And while he did that, and while some of you were praising him for doing so, behind closed doors, he was bringing in illegal immigrants, wasn't even allowing them to be vetted, just bringing them in, opening up the borders so that they could replace you. That's been the goal for decades. The Democrats had been planning on this. So when the more your eyes open and the more you awaken from your slumber, the more they're trying to bring in illegal immigrants to replace you. And they're putting those same illegal immigrants in your neighborhoods to take your resources from your communities and leave you with nothing. Look at what was done in Chicago, where you had all of these schools that were closed down, but yet they opened them up to use them as a safe haven for illegal immigrants. And even in New York, they closed the high school because the temperatures were so frigid that they used that high school as a shelter for illegal immigrants. And they spent billions of dollars giving these people room and board and feeding them. But yet they still tell you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Does that make sense? Look at how many incidents there have been with law enforcement targeting us. And it's not all. It's a few bad apples, but those bad apples are not being chastised like they should. Because there are some good people in law enforcement, but it's those bad apples that change the entire outlook of the field completely. Look at Sandra Bland, a woman who was arrested because she wouldn't put a cigarette out in her own vehicle. Look at Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old who is minding his own business with Skittles and an Arizona iced tea. And you had some low-down racist decided to take matters into his own hands. Even though 911 Dispatch told this man to stand down and let the police investigate to see what was going on. And every time there's a situation where one of our people is unalive, then they decide to have the media bring up something in their past that maybe wasn't the greatest, but it had nothing to do with the situation that took place. Look at Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old that was playing with a BB gun. And within a short amount of seconds, an officer pulled up and unalived them. Are you starting to understand why I'm asking, why are we celebrating Juneteenth? Because yeah, maybe some things have changed, but overall it really hasn't. We're still on jobs where we get unfair treatment. We're scrutinized for the tiniest thing. We're demonized as being overly aggressive, having an attitude for speaking up for ourselves when yet we're surrounded by some communities that believe we shouldn't have a say-so in anything. But yet this country would not have the level of wealth that it touts around without the labor of our people that was forced through slavery, so we weren't even compensated. And the last group of people that was blatantly targeted by the government during World War II, Ronald Reagan gave them reparations. But we're the people that have been in this country for four centuries, not by choice. We are the only group of people that did not come here by choice. We were forced here. And some ignorant people will say, well, just leave the country. First of all, the country that my homeland is is occupied. And there's another group of people that's claiming my identity. So it's not going to be accepted for me to go back to my home country that I'm well aware of. But this is what we have to deal with. And the biggest oppressor of our people are those sellouts within our community. A lot of you will call them Pookie and Ray-Ray. That mentality. The ones that go around robbing their own, scheming on their own. Every time you take a few steps forward, they try to take you 20 steps backwards. Those. The same ones that will falsely accuse you of something on a job and approach your supervisor with a lie to try to get you terminated. Those are the type of people. And some of you will call them Uncle Tom's when that's the incorrect terminology. The correct terminology would be Sambo's. Because if any of you actually read the book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, where that terminology actually came from, you would realize that Uncle Tom is the one that was trying to help everyone. Sambo was the one that was trying to bring everyone down and went running back to master. You see, everyone, we we need to give ourselves some real education, not this watered down nonsense that we currently deal with. And what's interesting is your children would go to the same schools as other communities, but yet other communities still do better financially because they have a better understanding of the stock market and investing. And that's something that's passed down within their family. It doesn't happen in school at all. Why is that? Did you know that you could have had free health care decades ago, but people didn't want our people having free health care, so that's why we're in the current crisis that we're in now? And really it's quite humorous when I think about it, because our people were always into natural remedies. We were never into these different chemicals that they use to make these different drugs. That was never part of our community. And some of you know that already. Just look at the home remedies that your grandparents made for different ailments or your great-great-grandparents made. That's because that was part of our culture. And some of you that are bringing this down, you have that mentality that all black people have to live in some large city in some small square footage area over top of somebody, and you feel as though that's always been part of our culture. And it hasn't. Do you realize that in our real homeland that we had crops, we had livestock? So it's my determination that sometimes in these large cities, the reason why we don't get along with each other is because we're we're basically put on top of each other. And we're a community that values our our space. We're the one community that gets offended if you stand too close to us. When other communities is fine for them, but we value our space. So if you're not within our social circle, we don't want you that close to us. But some of you judgmental sellouts seem to think that we're supposed to be in large cities, and we always have when we weren't, because if you have a number of large crops and livestock, you know it's just about impossible to live real close to somebody. You you have a large space around you that puts some distance between you and your neighbor. We're not in these little small living quarters sitting on top of each other practically. That's part of the reason why we don't get along with each other sometimes. We're too close to each other. We don't have enough space. But some of you will some of you will look at us when we move out of the city and live in the suburbs because you're not as on top of each other as you would be in a large city. It's time to educate yourselves on a lot of different things and stop believing everything that you're told about our community. We need to start educating each other again. So I ask you, why are you celebrating Juneteenth? What's really changed? Now, I can tell you that both of my parents, up until early adulthood, they lived through the Jim Crow era, which either ended by 1965 or 1968, between that time. But it's something that started in the 1870s. So really it's going close to around 60 years. That's really not a whole lot of time. So, ladies and gentlemen, although we have made some strides in improving ourselves, I think we've gotten too comfortable with the way things are instead of the way things should be. And when it comes to Juneteenth, I believe a lot of you are content with the fact that, yeah, the majority of us aren't in physical bondage, but we're still in bondage. Look at how we're still reacted to. We still have people that do us harm just like they did back in slavery days, and they're still not held accountable. People feel as though they can still police us without actually being the police. Just think about that one. Because we have people that are taught that they're so superior to us and that we basically don't have rights that they should respect. And that was told in the Dred Scott case. That's still on the books. Just look that up. This is the information age. So I'm gonna close out with reevaluate everything. Look at everything through a microscope and tell me, have we really made some real strides in society? Or do we still really have a long way to go? And we're well capable of excelling and exceeding. You saw that with Black Wall Street, Tulsa, Oklahoma. And there's been a number of other communities that were like that. Some of you don't even realize that where Central Park is now in New York was once Seneca Village, which had a large black population. But our government being the way that it is, used eminent domain and built a park over that area. And you'll find that a lot of highways were constructed through black neighborhoods. But yeah, this is the same country that says they don't owe us reparations because we weren't around during slavery days and neither were they. So they shouldn't pay us anything. But we're still in bondage. It's just not the physical bondage that everyone has been made aware of. So that's all I have to say. And I hope this changed your thoughts on a lot of different things that we endured. But until then, take care and be blessed.