Corporate America embraces Juneteenth as a paid holiday. A gesture or a turning point?
Corporate America marked Juneteenth with a paid holiday for employees, by closing offices for the day, giving employees paid time off, and calling on workers, as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos said this week, to “reflect, learn and support each other.”
Juneteenth, celebrated annually on June 19, commemorates when Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, in 1865 to announce the Civil War had ended and slavery was no more – two years after President Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation.
But Juneteenth, the oldest commemoration of the end of slavery in the U.S., is taking on new urgency this year as demands for racial justice and police accountability flooded the nation’s streets in the weeks since George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police. Americans are facing another reckoning of race, one of the nation’s foundational human rights issues.
Corporate America has rushed in recent days to make its statements – paid days off for employees at Nike and Twitter; acknowledgment and closed offices at the National Football League. Only a few years earlier, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protest against police brutality roiled the NFL and fans and angered President Donald Trump, who famously referred to Kaepernick and other protesting Black football players as “sons of bitches.”
Bezos, in a memo to employees published by CNBC.com, said he would cancel his meetings Friday and encouraged Amazon workers to do the same. Amazon, he said, will offer “online learning opportunities” to its workers through the day.
Bezos said he had thought about “how recent events in our country have laid bare the systemic racism and injustices that oppress Black individuals and communities.”
In New York and Virginia, governors announced their plans to make Juneteenth official state holidays.
And in Sacramento, the Kings declared Juneteenth a paid holiday to commemorate the end of slavery.
The annual holiday “will provide team members an opportunity to reflect, learn more about addressing racial inequity and participate in civic engagement,” officials with the NBA team said in a statement.
Turning point in race relations?
That those loud calls for change are being heard in executive suites mark a potential turning point on race relations in weeks full of them. But California academics and business and professional leaders who spoke with The Sacramento Bee this week asked if the corporate gestures were enough.
“It isn’t the only thing that needs to happen. It’s a corporate social responsibility, but there’s a lot more work that needs to be done,” said Trisha Zulic, California state director of the Society for Human Resource Management, a national trade group representing human resource professionals.
Zulic, who is Black and based in San Diego, said her family has celebrated Juneteenth for generations.
“It starts part of the conversation, but it doesn’t get to the root cause,” Zulic said of corporate recognition of Juneteenth and its response to the Black Lives Matter movement. “The conversations are hard (but) we had a perfect storm in America: COVID happened, then George Floyd happened. People said, ‘I have a voice.’ The Fourth of July is the nation’s birthday, but the Black people who built this country – we weren’t freed until June 19th (1865). For corporations, that’s the thought now, but it should’ve been a thought years ago.”
“It’s not something that you can plant a flag on and say, ‘We’ve done this for eternity,’” said California State University, Sacramento, business professor Michael Boniface.
Boniface, who teaches organizational change and founder’s values at Sacramento State, sees opportunity for a new corporate culture to take root – from the outrage and activism sprung from Floyd’s death, to pressure from employees, stakeholders and customers, to a recognition of the moment by corporate leaders. And those firms have tools they have long used to create corporate “communities” from their large, disparate work forces.
Many make the link between the Black Lives Matter movement to the civil rights movement more than a half-century earlier.
Boniface sees a more recent connection: the economic and diplomatic pressure that brought an end to Apartheid, the policy of institutionalized racial separation in South Africa, 30 years ago.
“We have leadership, a coming together of events that have always existed, but have become more prevalent. We may be onto something here. It takes commitment, but for the first time, I see that come together. It needs to be bottom-driven, but receive legitimacy from the top,” Boniface said. “Corporate America has had the tools to do this. We have the tools to make this lasting. And they are the exemplars – if they do it, others will follow.”
He said Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to many of the same issues of racial, social and economic justice at Sacramento State more than 50 years ago.
Boniface added, “we see these anomalies that don’t go away. When you see that officer rest his knee with that sense of ownership – it’s shocking.”
‘We have to be deeper than that’
But Jay King, president of the California Black Chamber of Commerce and a member of the Sacramento Community Police Review Commission, sees corporate recognition of Juneteenth as a superficial gesture while more concrete, systemic change is left wanting.
“A paid holiday means nothing to me (rather than) receiving equitable treatment and being treated as a full-blooded American,” King said. “I want America to stop running from its past. We have to be deeper than that.”
King calls for more lasting, effective economic, academic and societal instruments including down-payment grants for black home-buyers to boost home ownership and free college tuition to help achieve more effective change.
“It can’t be just a word, a theme or a movement, it has to be a lifestyle change. We can’t treat this like a diet. This is something we have to do to change our life. We’ve been doing this yo-yo diet since 1865,” King said. “America has to be willing to hear the story – and Black people have to be able to talk about it without anger or animosity.”
The killing of George Floyd under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer last month that sparked nationwide protests for racial justice, worldwide outrage and a movement to overhaul American policing grimly amplified the point for King.
“A dog would never have had that fate,” King said. “George Floyd has opened the eyes of a lot of people.”
The demand for deeper change across society spurred by a younger generation has “upped the ante for all of us,” King said. “They’re saying, ‘We’re not going to buy into your hate. We’re not going to buy into your systemic racism.’ Young people don’t buy into it. Not only won’t they stand for it, they will put their lives and their livelihoods on the line.”
“Corporate America has to be put under the spotlight,” King continued. “This may be a diet for corporate America, but it’s a cultural change these young people are looking for.”
This story was originally published June 19, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
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