My thoughts on movement strategy, politics, and the fight ahead.
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A quick (celebratory) note: The other week, I wrote to you about my Knicks and the difference between merely making the Finals and actually winning them. Well. They won it. First title since 1973 and the largest comeback in Finals history in Game 4. They trailed in every single game for almost the entire game. But in four of the five, they came back in the end to win it. They never played like the score at any given moment had anything to do with what the final score would be.
They won because they believed. During halftime in each game, they became determined to cut the other team's lead bit by bit, giving themselves more and more of a chance to win.
But they didn't just embrace the rhetoric of belief (which can also be called fantasy: belief without commitment, a dream without a plan). They exemplified what I call “a culture of belief,” which is what success runs on: belief backed up by actions that demonstrate just how much you believe—accepting what's not working, inventing new strategies, being creative and bold, internalizing a new plan, raising your level at the right moment, knowing who's hot and running with them, getting the best out of yourself and others, getting locked in as a team. One chapter in From Presence to Power is about the role that a culture of belief plays in gaining and using power. It's what makes come-from-behind wins possible, including wins for campaigns and movements. Belief is what enables you to win when everything in front of you says the game is already lost. There were many times we felt like we were in the wilderness on LGBT rights, for example. Those who truly believed—and acted like it—are the people who cleared the path forward.
The midterms are the halftime of the presidential cycle: we're at halftime in Game 2 of the Trump administration. The scoreboard is ugly. It's time to believe in each other and what we can do together. At the same time, there are many fantasies about turning things around, posing as belief, which can take us off course. The difference between indulging in the fantasy of winning and creating a culture of belief that can actually enable us to win will mark the outcomes we live with when the game is over.
Now, about Juneteenth and America 250…
There are two national celebrations landing over these next few weeks, pulling in opposite directions. All the official Trump machinery is spinning up for the 250th, their version of America's birthday party. And, of course, there's another national holiday tomorrow: Juneteenth.
The real question isn't about how to define the story they have introduced—i.e. changing what the 250th anniversary of the country means to people—but whether we spend too much of our energy fighting their story instead of building up our own.
There's energy being spent combating their celebration with alternative 250th events and other counter-programming meant to outshine the Trump-led 250th story. But we're always going to be playing catch-up if we try to own a story that most people on our side don't feel is authentic to us, competing on the other side's terrain. It's like selling veggie dogs at a county fair. We'll get some bites, and it's important to show up and maybe get some converts, but we're never going to outperform the dominant foods in that environment and we're never going to make that environment our home: the place where we take over and win.
We're missing an opportunity by not turning Juneteenth—the holiday our side made official—into the authentic vehicle for our people to say what this country means to us…and what we want it to be.
The 250th celebration is bait. The pomp, the spectacle. All of it is meant to draw our attention and our outrage onto their terms and their story about this country. That's the trap. When their version of the story gets that loud, the instinct is to spend our energy answering it: correcting it, protesting it, naming everything it leaves out.
But we win by telling a different story, one that brings more of our people together and makes our side more powerful.
Juneteenth gives us the chance to build something bigger and more lasting than any holiday Trump can stage or hijack. We miss it when we let it become just another day off. How many people actually mark Memorial Day or pause on Labor Day? How fast a holiday can become a long weekend and nothing more. Look at King Day, which has been flattened by some (including many Democrats) into just a day of service, sanded down into charity and good deeds, with the demand for structural change quietly stripped out. It became a day to tend to the unfortunate, instead of battling the unjust.
The right, on the other hand, turned “Merry Christmas” into a loyalty test and manufactured a whole war on Christmas, telling that story year after year until the holiday carried a new and real political weight.
They are invested in the meaning of July 4 right now. We're investing in saying they're wrong. But that's not creating meaning and building identity, community and movement out of that meaning, which can carry us through resistance and into real power. That's a missed opportunity.
Juneteenth is, at its core, much bigger than the end of enslavement. It's a story of progress, and of everything progress actually costs: the sacrifice, the strategy, and the sheer belief it takes to win change and then defend it and win it again (and again and again). That isn't a finished thing we inherited and set on a shelf. It's something we're still writing, in real time, and every generation has had a hand in its making. It's an inspiring story if a painful one. It's the truest marker of freedom this country has.
I was reminded of the forgotten parts of the holiday while listening to Monifa Bandele speak at a Juneteenth celebration at Gracie Mansion last week, shortly before Mayor Mamdani spoke. (If you don't know Monifa, you should - she is someone we'll all be calling a legendary organizer one day, as soon as she's old enough for the title. 🙂) The familiar version of Juneteenth has a Union general arriving in Galveston in 1865 to inform enslaved people they were free, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, as if the news had simply traveled slow. But Monifa, drawing on her own family's oral history out of south Texas, tells it differently. Black people in Texas knew that freedom had been declared. What kept them in bondage was about power, not knowledge—it was the fact that the new rules hadn't been implemented or enforced. Emancipation didn't move slowly because word was slow. It moved at the speed of deference to white supremacy. What made Juneteenth a holiday was not the order from above, but Black communities deciding then and every year since to claim the day and carry it as their own.
July 4th was about independence for a few. Juneteenth was about freedom for everyone, however complicated and uneven. Both matter! But only one of them is about everyone.
The administration and their supporters are always facing behind, looking backward. Their entire project points backward. When the point is to go back, you don't have to protect the climate for anyone, or invest in roads and schools, or do the slow work of building a place where people who don't already agree can still live alongside one another. You take what you can while you can, and you leave. The people who come after you aren't your problem.
But that's the beauty of Juneteenth: it points the other way. It was about people stepping toward a future they had every reason not to believe in, believing in it anyway, and staying to build it.
By celebrating Juneteenth, it pulls focus away from the other celebration, not because we're pushing back against the other but because we're creating our own. If we treat the day like it carries weight, it will carry weight. That is to say, the weight is ours to give it, and Juneteenth only becomes what we decide to make it. That decision is a small act of belief in the future, the same belief that wins championships and, far more than that, builds the country we actually want to live in.
Every movement that ever moved depended on people who could believe in something they hadn't yet seen or touched. People willing to make alliances they wouldn't have made before. People willing to listen to voices they hadn't listened to before, because the future they were reaching for was worth more than the comfort of standing still. That's a practice, and it can be the practice of this day: belief in what comes next, learning from our past, and the patient work of building rather than tearing down.
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