President Biden and VP Kamala Harris and members of Congress declares Juneteenth a national holiday — Image: Carlos Barria/Reuters

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Will The Biden Administration Defeat Police Brutality?

Ezinne Ukoha

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The first time I heard about Juneteenth was during my college days at UMKC, thanks to my honorary “godmother” a Black woman and native of Kansas City, who also exposed me to the annual Jazz festival and the early summer street fair, marking the historical event that I didn’t quite understand — until many years later.

The relevance of Juneteenth has become the focal point of ongoing conversation centered around the unsettled atrocities against American descendants of slaves, who are still waiting on long overdue reparations.

In the meantime, the Biden administration has declared the occasion a national holiday for all Americans, which is already a sticky controversy stemming from the inappropriateness of white people benefiting from what Black people had to endure during the evils of slavery, and even presently with the systemic violence of police brutality.

A year ago, while the world was under siege by the deadly arrival of a killer virus, there were massive protests underway in response to the horrific fate of the painted subject, boasting a soft-looking face and expressive eyes in vibrant murals representing the likeness of George Floyd, whose systemic killing was supposed to swiftly enact applicable police reform without hesitancy.

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