The Voting Rights Act was only signed 55 years ago. Tonight I'm thinking about all the Black folks in Georgia who have lived on both sides of it. Who… - Clint Smith

And so, part of what is happening in these state legislatures across the country with regard to the effort to push back against teaching of history — 1619 Project, critical race theory and the like — is a recognition that we have developed in this country a more sophisticated understanding, a more sophisticated framework, a more sophisticated public lexicon, with which to understand how slavery — how racism was not just an interpersonal phenomenon, it was a historic one, it was a structural one, it was a systemic one. And I’m very much sympathetic — I know there’s some sentiment out there, that people are saying, “Well, we didn’t ask for Juneteenth to become a holiday. We want voting rights. We want police reform. We want abolition. We want” — and I 100% understand that. I also think that we should not undervalue what it means for Juneteenth to become a holiday, in part because then we are not valuing the work that Black activists have done over the course of decades to get there, and because while symbols are not necessarily material change, they are not irrelevant.

Saying "I worked very hard for it" to justify your position as a billionaire is one of the most absurd things I can imagine when there are people working multiple jobs who still don't make enough to feed their children and pay their rent.

I'll keep saying it, keeping millions of ppl in poverty is a choice this country makes every day. There is enough money for ppl not to be evicted from their homes, there is enough for ppl not to go hungry, there is enough for ppl to avoid jail bc of a parking ticket. It's absurd.