Juneteenth, Slavery, and Learning Lessons…

By Joe Maniscalco

There’s a lot for a labor writer who’s covered the trade union movement for more than a decade to think about on Juneteenth. But this year, the thing I keep coming back to is how the single most important truism working people can understand right now might go back to something Maya Angelou talked about while taping a 1997 Oprah Winfrey television special in her pajamas.

“When people show you who they are, believe them the first time,” is one of the most famous quotations attributed to the late, great Maya Angelou. And for good reason. 

Juneteenth recalls that day in 1865 when the United States government, through its official representative Major General Gordon Granger, finally got around to telling the enslaved people of Texas — two years after emancipation — that they would no longer be held in bondage the way they’d been.

“Juneteenth National Independence Day” has been a federal holiday — for two years.

“When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”

If we haven’t already realized this by now — slavery, forced labor and poverty wages are baked into our economic system. It’s capitalism’s endgame; and capitalists achieved their collective goal right out of the gate. Everything they’ve done since has been an ongoing effort to get back to that ideal state. 

In other words, they’ve shown us who they are.

Failure to understand this fundamental fact is a failure — either willfully or ignorantly — to understand anything. This system’s goal is, and has always been, to either rob working people of their labor through outright slavery — or pay as little as possible for it.

That’s profit. 

The Labor-management relations fantasy is a pipe dream working class people should have long ago given up as they watched the last U.S. manufacturing plant  disappear over the horizon. 

Again, I say all this, not as any kind of economic expert or Marxist scholar — because I am neither of those things. Just somebody who’s learned something very apparent on the ground, in the real world.

For instance, a couple of years ago, I reported on the brutal working conditions inside several Amazon warehouses, and how whole families dependent on the company for their economic survival were “reluctant” to speak out about the unsafe working conditions and other workplace injustices they endured. 

“[Amazon] knows the level of desperation out there,” U.S. Navy veteran and West Deptford, NJ Amazon warehouse worker Courtney Brown told me. “We see almost entire families working in there; parents and their kids, husbands and their wives, fathers and sons. They hire the whole ‘hood. I find that to be insane.”

Around the same time, I also reported on the Veterans Administration and how former U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert Wilkie had actually succeeded in creating a thick atmosphere of racism and white supremacy within the agency.

According to Barbara Galle, president of AFGE Local 3669 and a registered nurse at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center, it was all part of an effort to “get rid of the union” and make sure employees were silent and servile — just like in the plantation days of the antebellum South.

Sounds like slavery to me.

“When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Seattle City Council Member Kshama Sawant was recently in New York City to help launch Workers Strike Back — a new organization its members hope will be able to help inject some needed militancy into a atrophied U.S. labor movement.

Sawant perfectly summed up the reality working people face today, and have faced throughout time.

“Part of the ABC’s of organizing, if you want to win,” she said, “is to understand there is an adversarial relationship between bosses and workers.”

It’s a simple, fundamental point — and one that labor historians tell us is at the heart of the disastrous schism that occurred within the labor movement between the business unionists and militant trade unionists some 75 years ago — and one that accounts for labor’s anemic condition today.  

Tragically, as celebrated journalist Chris Hedges also pointed out during the Workers Strike Back launch, the task for working people now, is to not only confront “a system gamed against us through the two-party duopoly — it’s also “confronting a union leadership that have become junior partners in the capitalist system.”

“When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Profound, observation indeed — thank you, Maya Angelou.

And now that I think of it, I’ll include one more observation from another late, revolutionary artist. Someone who, I’m not sure, but might never have ever met Oprah — Joe Strummer of The Clash.

“Let fury have the hour/Anger can be power/Do you know that you can use it?

Thanks to you, too, Joe.

Happy Juneteenth.

Will we as working class people put what we know to good use?