Juneteenth has been pushed on the working class as a progressive holiday, perpetuating myths of democracy in is a holiday that’s been celebrated in Texas since 1867. The holiday grew from the fact that slaves in Texas were not told they had been emancipated until 1865, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
This holiday echoes the elevation of Lincoln by Obama, who was sworn into office on the Lincoln Bible, in an effort to declare his election victory the antiracist culmination of a struggle to realize American “democracy” that began with the “great emancipator” and victor of the Civil War.
The push for Juneteenth serves to perpetuate two myths:
First, that U.S. capitalism and “democracy” has a history of continuous progress to eliminate racism, and,
Second, the U.S. government and U.S. presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Obama have been the true representatives of anti-racism in world history.
The goal of both of these myths is to convince the working class, especially Black workers, to support U.S. imperialism. With the U.S. fighting multiple oil wars and in the midst of an economic depression, the ruling class has continued to explain its wars of empire as efforts to spread human rights and liberties around the world. As in earlier wars of empire, the U.S. ruling class hopes to hide the reality of racism behind the image of a false hero such as Lincoln or Obama.
But we in the working class need to understand that racism is a fundamental part of capitalism. The capitalists and their politicians are the promoters and beneficiaries of racism, reaping profits, preventing rebellions with divide-and-conquer tactics, and mobilizing soldiers to fight the capitalist battles by demonizing the enemy. 
Communist revolution is the only way to end racism and smash the capitalist system that invented it and promotes it.
Racism Born in The U.S.A
The first myth can be exploded by looking at the origins and reality of racism in the contemporary United States. Racism is the product of U.S. agrarian capitalism, codified in the laws of colonial Virginia, where European and African indentured laborers had a rich history of multiracial resistance to exploitation. In order to control their rebellious workforce, landowners began imposing differential punishments on Black and white servants, enacted laws to criminalize Black and white unity, and defined slave status as passing from mother to child.
By 1705, these laws defined slaves as real estate and decriminalized the killing of a slave by an owner. Black landowners were denied the right to employ white servants, and by 1722 were denied the right to vote. This was a decision justified by the governor of Virginia as necessary to “fix a perpetual Brand on Negroes” in order to secure the institution of slavery. 
After independence, the U.S. Constitution protected slavery as a “domestic institution” of the member states. The fugitive slave clause and the fugitive slave acts of 1793 and 1850 required the federal government and all citizens to chase down and return runaway slaves, a law defied by the many white and Black abolitionists who participated in the Underground Railroad. 
Racism had been born as a material source of super-exploitation and as the key ideology of capitalism. It would spread around the world from this point as each capitalist country defined some group—Black, Latin, immigrant—and developed new racial theories to justify super-exploitation and to divide and conquer the working class. Despite all the hype about a Black president, racist super-exploitation is the name of the game around the world. All workers are exploited, paid only enough to reproduce themselves as a labor force, but Black and Latin workers are exploited even more viciously.
The material reality of racism is manifest in unemployment figures. Official unemployment in the U.S. is 15 million people, which doesn’t include another 15 million who can’t find a full-time job or have given up looking. In April 2010, the official unemployment rate was 8.8percent for white, 16.5 percent for Black, and 12.6 percent for Latin. This itself doesn’t tell the whole truth, since the unemployment rate for Black men in many cities like Detroit is nearly 50 percent. And racism is getting worse. In 1974 median Black incomes were 73 percent of those of white families. In 2004, a typical Black family had an income of 54 percent of a white family.
Racism Hurts ALL Workers
Racism drags down the wages of all workers, and this is clearest in the former slave states where wages for Black, white and Latin workers continue to be the lowest in the nation. For example, Boeing opened a new plant in South Carolina with hopes to lure even more Boeing production by offering low wages, no unions, and more importantly a low level of labor militancy.
Ultimately, domestic exploitation will only take capitalism so far. The bosses understand that the top-dog capitalists will be determined on the global stage, through inter-imperialist war. In the past two decades, anti-Muslim racism has been a key component of the bosses’ war strategy from Iraq to Afghanistan, from Pakistan to Yemen. This enables them to kill and maim millions throughout the Middle East with little to no protest. U.S. soldiers are fueled by the anti-Muslim racism promoted by military officers and carry out racist laws passed on the floor of Congress that target Arabs and other immigrant groups specifically and workers in general.
Presidents from Lincoln to Obama understand the necessity of racism to maximize profits and to prevent workers from uniting against capitalism. They also understand that workers must be convinced to rally around the nation’s flag for capitalist and imperialist war. History becomes an important weapon in how the bosses convince workers to fight for capitalism instead of in their own class interests.
Juneteenth Hides Truth of Lincoln’s Racist Union ‘Victory’
So how do they convince us to put up with this? Part of the story is to convince us that the politicians and the government are the key forces for change, and that other workers are the enemy or powerless. Here Juneteenth and similar holidays play a role by hiding the true history of the end of slavery: that it came as a result of the struggles of Black and white workers, not through the actions of the racist Abraham Lincoln.
When the Civil War began, Lincoln’s goal was to maintain the Union for the capitalist class, not to abolish slavery or to eliminate racism. Lincoln was an open racist who declared, “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about the social and political equality of the white and Black races.” As the Civil War began in 1861, Lincoln advocated “colonizing” Black people in Africa and Central America; supported a constitutional amendment protecting slavery where it already existed; refused to enlist them into the army; and ordered continued enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act which required all citizens to return runaway slaves to their masters.
But as more enslaved Black workers fled to Union lines, many Union soldiers refused to return them to their owners, and some generals attempted to abolish slavery in the occupied slave territories. Over Lincoln’s objections, Congress passed laws that confiscated slaves (property) of Confederate owners and used them as Union soldiers, but still in bondage. In September 1862, Lincoln adopted partial emancipation as a diplomatic and military tactic. In the Emancipation Proclamation, he requested that Congress appropriate funds for the deportation of freed slaves and announced that slaves in any states that continued to rebel would be freed on January 1, 1863.
This proclamation by itself freed no one. Slaves in Maryland, Delaware, Missouri or Kentucky, slave states that were loyal to the union, were not covered. Slavery was not abolished there until the ratification of the 13th amendment in December 1865, six months after Juneteenth. The proclamation could be enforced in the eleven rebellious Confederate states only if and when the Union Army arrived.
The real Liberators of Slaves
The real fight against slavery came from hundreds of slave revolts that had destabilized the system from the inside. The most famous of these are:
The Haitian rebellions that eliminated slavery and drove the French from the island in 1804
The rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831
The 1859 John Brown and Harriet Tubman attack on the Marine armory at Harper’s Ferry, a military effort by Black and white abolitionists, which forced millions to realize that pacifism would not end slavery. 
During the Civil War, 180,000 slaves took up arms and joined the fight against their masters whenever the Union army neared. And in the Mississippi Valley, two-thirds of the Union army was Black, half of whom were former slaves. Others took over abandoned plantations, and divided the land among themselves. All of this worried capitalist politicians, including Lincoln, who in April 1865 was scheming to remove former Black soldiers from the nation because he feared that these disciplined men would mount a “guerilla war” against their former owners.
Fighting Racism
There is a third story hidden within the myths of U.S. anti-racism: the story of multiracial unity and fight-back, and the fact that racism has to be constantly reinvented to prevent the potential power of a unified working class. Many CHALLENGE readers are familiar with the multiracial unity of antiracist fighters like John Brown and the Black-white unity of the 1892 New Orleans general strike. This kind of action was a constant undercurrent. 
For example, in Galveston, TX, in the 1840s-60s the common everyday experience of poor white dockworkers and enslaved Black workers overshadowed their racial “differences.” Despite the efforts of the city government to prevent mixing of Black and white workers, many rejected the bosses’ racism and saw themselves as part of the same exploited class.
Other examples suggest that rather than celebrating the bosses’ Juneteenth holiday, workers should celebrate our own Juneteenth. On June 14, 1919 nearly one hundred white lumber workers in Bogalusa, LA armed themselves to defend Black workers from company threats against unionizing. In unity, armed white workers safely escorted the Black workers from their homes to a union meeting. Several white workers were killed defending a Black worker and union activist who was on the run from company thugs trying to kill him.
These stories highlight the potential for multiracial unity among workers once we realize our common class interest. We must take inspiration from these examples but also recognize the limits. These battles focused mainly on efforts to unite workers across racial lines, but lacking a communist analysis, failed to attack the capitalist system that perpetuates and enforces racism.
The bosses keep racism alive in the 21st century, using holidays such as Juneteenth to keep workers divided, while hiding the story of working-class unity and fight-back. Antiracist unity poses one of the greatest threats to the bosses. Both Lincoln and Obama and every president in between understood this fact. Fighting racism is a key task for communists and the working class today. We must seize upon the history of our predecessors and build a multiracial fighting party, the PLP, to smash the racist system of capitalism once and for all.