Juneteenth: All of Us or None of Us

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Thank you to every soul who tuned in to today’s Substack Live—whether you stayed for the full hour or caught just a few minutes in between meetings, errands, or moments of rest.

We don’t take your presence for granted.

These aren’t just livestreams—they’re living rooms.
They’re places we gather not to perform, but to be real. To be challenged. To be seen.

And if you can’t join us in real time, we will see you too.
That’s why we’ve included the full replay above.

Whether you begin here or come back later, let this recording be more than just a recap.
Let it be part of how you remember—and part of why you move forward with more intention, more heart, and more clarity.

Our next live conversation is this coming Monday at 8 PM EST.
Different topic. Same truth-telling spirit.
Same commitment to showing up—not perfectly, but honestly.

We’d love to see you there.
Bring your questions. Bring your contradictions.
Bring all of you.

Because that’s who we’re building this with—and for.
Always.

Why We Spoke

Just two white men. One is from the U.S., and the other is from Brazil.

Neither descended from enslaved Africans. Neither was raised in a culture where Juneteenth was recognized as a holiday.

So why speak at all?

Because freedom, when delayed, becomes a pattern.

Because silence from those who benefit, even indirectly, is never neutral. This day is not just Black history; it’s Human history.

We didn’t speak as experts.
We spoke because we believe that remembering matters.

And when building a platform like Kornerz, a place for honest belonging, we can’t just post on the easy days. We have to show up on the hard ones, too.

Juneteenth is one of those days, not only for celebration but also for reflection, responsibility, and truth-telling. 

During the live event, we shared openly: 

We didn’t grow up with Juneteenth. It wasn’t part of our classrooms. 

We had to unlearn what we thought freedom meant and relearn what delay has always signified in Black lives.

There’s humility in admitting what we don’t know. 

But there’s danger in staying quiet.

”We listen, but we don’t judge.”

What Juneteenth Means

On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers—led by Major General Gordon Granger—arrived in Galveston, Texas, to announce what should never have been a secret: enslaved Black Americans were free.

But the truth is, they had been free—at least on paper—for over two and a half years.

President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. It declared that all enslaved people in Confederate states “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” Yet in Texas—where Confederate control remained strong and isolated—plantation owners simply chose not to share that news. There was no internet, no federal enforcement, and no incentive to disrupt the unpaid labor that fueled their wealth. So they didn’t.

For over 900 days, Black men, women, and children in Texas were forced to continue living in bondage—working under whips, raped without consequence, families torn apart, bodies sold, dignity erased—all while their legal freedom had already been declared in Washington.

That delay isn’t just a side note; it is the story.

Because this wasn’t an unfortunate oversight or a bureaucratic lag, it was by design.

The people who held the power to tell the truth chose not to.
The ones with the most to lose stayed silent to keep profiting.
Freedom had been declared, but without accountability, that freedom became meaningless ink on forgotten parchment.

Juneteenth reminds us that justice, when unspoken, can still be stolen.
That’s right: when hidden, it might as well be revoked.
And that delay has always been a tool of oppression, not just in the past, but now.

Because that pattern hasn’t ended.

We still see it today, coded in legislation and clothed in civility:

• The right to vote exists, but is stripped by redistricting, ID laws, and inaccessible polling places.

• The right to healthcare exists—good luck if you’re uninsured, underpaid, or born in the wrong zip code.

• The right to marry, to express gender identity, to bodily autonomy—they’re all “legal” until someone decides they shouldn’t be anymore.

Delays are still built into our systems.
Not by accident, but by design.

The longer justice is delayed, the more comfortable the powerful become with injustice. Juneteenth is a celebration—but it also serves as a reminder: No proclamation is self-executing. Freedom must be delivered, not just declared. And when we stop fighting for it, delay becomes denial all over again.

Tulsa and the Risk of Black Success

If Juneteenth reveals the gap between declaration and delivery, then Tulsa reveals the violent backlash that can follow even the semblance of progress.

In 1921, the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma—often referred to as Black Wall Street—stood as a beacon. A triumph. A neighborhood that demonstrated what Black Americans could build even in the shadow of slavery and the grip of Jim Crow.

In Greenwood, Black success wasn’t hypothetical.
It was real.
It was thriving.

There were banks owned by Black families, law offices run by Black attorneys, libraries built by the community, and newspapers printed with pride. Theaters. Restaurants. Schools. Grocery stores. Doctors. Dentists. Dreamers. Architects. All Black. All excellent.

Yet in America, Black excellence has often been regarded as a threat, not a triumph.

It took just one false accusation to ignite the fire:
A young Black man.
A white woman.
An elevator.
A moment.

And then the myth of white fragility transformed into the machinery of white terror.

Over the next 24 hours, white mobs—armed and appointed by the city—descended on Greenwood. They looted homes. Set businesses ablaze. Dropped firebombs from airplanes. Shot residents on sight. And when it was over:

• Over 300 Black lives were lost.

• 10,000 people displaced.

• 35 city blocks reduced to rubble.

• No one charged.

• No reparations paid.

• No insurance honored.

• No justice delivered.

It was one of the most devastating acts of racial violence in U.S. history, and yet for decades, it was almost completely erased from textbooks. Brushed aside. Treated like a footnote, if mentioned at all.

Greenwood wasn’t destroyed because it failed.

It was destroyed because it succeeded.

It challenged the lie that Black people needed white benevolence to thrive. It made visible a truth that white supremacy could not tolerate: that when given access to opportunity, Black Americans could match—and exceed—any standard of excellence.

During our Substack Live, we sat with the grief of that truth.

We asked: Why aren’t we taught these stories earlier, deeper, louder?

Why are tales of violence sanitized, rewritten, or omitted altogether while the myth of American fairness is repeated like gospel?

The answer is painful, but clear:

Because remembering threatens the comfort of those who benefit from forgetting.

And yet we remember—not to stay in the grief, but to carry the truth forward.

Because forgetting does not protect the future.

It only guarantees that Greenwood happens again.

To honor the memory of Black Wall Street is to say: we saw what you built.

We saw what was lost.

And we refuse to let that brilliance be buried again.

A Global Pattern

Khalil didn’t grow up in the United States, but Juneteenth felt eerily familiar. Brazil—the country that shaped his childhood—was the last nation in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888. The law that ended bondage was celebrated as “Lei Áurea,” the Golden Law, yet nothing golden greeted those who had been owned just the day before. Enslaved people received no land, no wages, and no political voice. They were “free” to wander, to squat on the edges of sugarcane plantations that had once claimed their bodies, and to build improvised settlements called quilombos, which the new republic quickly labeled illegal. By every modern metric—wealth, health, schooling, and incarceration—Afro-Brazilians still pay the compounded interest on that empty emancipation.

And Brazil is not an outlier:

• India (1947). Colonial rule ends, but caste hierarchies—cemented and economically leveraged by the British—remain. Dalit women still face sexual violence with near-total impunity; manual-scavenging “jobs” are outlawed yet continue in the shadows. Political freedom arrived, but social release is still mortgaged.

• South Africa (1994). Apartheid’s legal scaffolding is dismantled, yet the average white household still owns ten times the wealth of the average Black household. Townships created to sequester Black labor in the 1950s now inherit the lowest budgets for schools, water, and policing. “Rainbow nation” rhetoric papers over an economic color line as stark as ever.

• Canada, the UK, and Australia. Formal apologies for Indigenous dispossession run alongside soaring child-removal rates and polluted reservation water supplies. In Canada, the last residential school closed in 1996—within living memory—yet suicide rates for First Nations youth remain among the highest in the world.

• France. The Republic proclaims liberté, égalité, fraternité while banning hijabs in classrooms and bulldozing migrant camps along the English Channel—proof that legal universalism often hides a cultural veto on difference.

Power claims to cherish freedom, yet resists providing it. Paper proclamations spread quickly. Structural repair progresses slowly—if it happens at all. This pattern repeats across continents:

Law says “you are free.”
Custom whispers “know your place.”
Economy answers “opportunity sold out—try again next generation.”

During today’s live, we kept returning to the same truth: the story repeats wherever memory is weak and accountability is optional. Juneteenth, Brazil’s Lei Áurea, India’s Independence Day, South Africa’s Freedom Day—all mark breakthroughs that can still be broken. Remembering is not nostalgia; it is maintenance. We acknowledge the gap between proclamation and reality so we can measure how wide it remains—and refuse to let it widen further.

Who Is Still Waiting?

Juneteenth is not just a date on a calendar.
It’s a mirror.
And every year it asks the same unblinking question:

Who is still waiting for their freedom to be real?

Because today, in 2025, plenty of “freedoms” live only on paper.

• Black Americans. Traffic stops that turn fatal five times more often. Maternal mortality rates that rival some developing nations. Neighborhood schools starved of funding by property-tax formulas designed to keep wealth in the same ZIP codes that have always had it. Median-white wealth is still eight times median-Black wealth—proof that emancipation without a reparative policy just hardens the gap.

• Trans and nonbinary people. Nearly two dozen U.S. states now ban or criminalize gender-affirming care for minors, and some for adults. Bathroom bills crawl back under new names. Identity itself is put on trial, as if existence needs legislative permission.

• Queer families. Parental-rights laws shift at state lines; a non-gestational mom in one jurisdiction is a legal stranger in the next. Hate-crime numbers spike while “religious-freedom” loopholes widen. Love becomes paperwork.

• Muslim and Sikh communities. Still “randomly selected” at airports. Still tracked by fusion-center algorithms that flag Arabic search terms. Mosques vandalized, gurdwaras guarded. Entire faiths are treated as potential threats.

• Disabled people. Sidewalks without curb cuts, videos without captions, “open-concept” offices that drown sensory processing. The Americans with Disabilities Act turns 35 this year, yet disabled unemployment sits at twice the national average.

• Immigrants and asylum seekers. Children sleep on concrete under Mylar blankets while politicians trade sound bites. Courts’ backlog for years; work permits dangle out of reach. Hope is asked to wait for its turn.

• Polyamorous households, people in larger bodies, neurodivergent minds, and anyone outside binary boxes of race, gender, belief, and ability. The common instruction is the same: shrink to fit, or pay the price.

So yes, Juneteenth is a Black American story—rooted in Galveston soil and Reconstruction dreams—but its lesson is universal:

A freedom that is selective in delivery is defective in design.

During our Substack Live, Rich named it plainly:

“Freedom that only works for some isn’t freedom. It’s favoritism. And it will never last.”

That line echoes because it’s true. Rights that stop at the edge of one identity eventually erode for all. Juneteenth’s mirror shows the crack—and invites us to keep polishing until every face reflected can recognize itself as fully, unequivocally free.

Why We Remember Here

The Worthy Mindset, nested inside the Wisdom & Wonder Korner, is our workshop for honest conversation and disciplined remembering.

We’re not ticking a box. We’re not posting for appearances. We’re identifying what occurred and what’s ongoing because a platform that claims to foster belonging must prioritize two pillars: memory and accountability.

Belonging without memory is mere decoration. Belonging with memory transforms into architecture, sturdy enough to shelter everyone.

But The Worthy Mindset isn’t only a sounding-board for hard history; it’s a classroom with no final bell.
We come here to learn together:

• to stretch the questions we inherited until they make room for the answers we actually need,

• to test our assumptions against lived experience,

• to let another person’s story rearrange the map of our own certainty,

• to practice curiosity sturdy enough to survive disagreement.

Every session, every Loop prompt, every late-night Nook replay is an invitation to expand how we think, how we see others, and how we understand ourselves.

Growth doesn’t just change opinions; it changes options. When more options emerge, there are more ways to thrive, to move, to love—freedom evolves from feeling like a scarce resource to feeling like shared air.

That is the long game:
A world where freedom isn’t rationed, negotiated, or disguised as privilege,
it’s real, it’s reachable, and it’s held in common by all of us.

What Comes Next

We don’t have all the answers.
And we’re not pretending we do.

But what we do have is a commitment to keep showing up.
To keep sitting with the hard stuff.
To keep honoring the discomfort that growth always brings.
Because freedom, when it’s real, is not a performance. It’s a practice.

That’s why Kornerz was built.
To hold space not just for expression, but for expansion.
Not just connection, but connection with meaning.

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Some Nooks are always open, day or night.
Think of them as community rooms that never close.

You can drop into any open Nook, and the moment you do, a gentle alert goes out to others in the Kornerz app letting them know:
“Hey, someone’s here. Want to join the conversation?”

Sometimes it sparks a beautiful moment of unexpected connection.
Sometimes it’s just you and your thoughts, held by the space.

If no one’s there right away, hang out for a few minutes. Scroll. Breathe.
As the Kornerz community continues to grow, more people will be online more often, ready to connect in real time.

Whether you’re processing something personal or just craving real talk without the performance, open Nooks meet you where you are.

🕰️ Scheduled Nooks

These are real-time, heart-forward conversations, live, vulnerable, and unfiltered.
Just like today’s.
You show up. We show up. The moment unfolds together.

☕ Coffee with Philosophy

One of our most beloved Scheduled Nooks.
Every Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 AM EST, we meet in the Wisdom & Wonder Korner for a slower, deeper start to the day.

There’s no performance here. Just warm mugs, open hearts, and thoughtful conversations about what truly matters: identity, purpose, meaning, grief, joy, wonder.

It’s not about having the right answers.
It’s about daring to ask better questions, together.

Final Thought

We didn’t speak today because we have the right to.
We spoke because we feel the responsibility, deep in our bones, deeper still in our hope.

Responsibility to truth.
Responsibility to memory.
Responsibility to those whose freedom has been delayed, distorted, denied.

We’re not historians.
We’re not scholars of civil rights.
We’re just two men, one from Brazil, one from the U.S., who understand that silence, especially from those with privilege, is never neutral.

We live in a time when memory is contested territory.
Where facts can be filtered, edited, or erased.
Where telling the truth about history is called divisive…
…while denying it is called patriotic.

But Juneteenth pushes back.

It says: No more forgetting.
It says: Don’t just mark the day, study the delay.
It says: Look at the gaps between what we promised and what we delivered—and then close them.

Because Juneteenth isn’t just a flag on the calendar.
It’s a flashlight aimed into the shadows.
A call to inspect every system, every story, every assumption about who gets to be free and who still waits.

It teaches us that freedom delayed is not freedom denied
unless we leave it that way.

This day reminds us: if justice is real, it must be shared.
If dignity is sacred, it must be universal.
If belonging is possible, it must be protected—not just when it’s easy, but especially when it’s not.

So we don’t speak today for performance.
We speak to honor.
We speak to remember.
We speak to say to our community: We will not forget. We will not unsee. We will not look away.

Let this post be a ripple.
Let this conversation be a mirror.
Let this not be the end.

We tell the story.
We hold the line.
And we keep going—together.

—

Khalil Jezini 💜

,

Rich Dornisch 🏳️‍🌈

The Worthy Mindset & the Kornerz Family

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