'Long arc of progress': Conservative website celebrates Juneteenth by highlighting 'powerful' Obama speech

19 June 2023

When Barack Obama was president, he made a concerted effort to reach out to conservatives — many of whom responded with nothing but contempt for him, especially in the far-right Tea Party movement. GOP presidential hopeful and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley continues to claim that Obama's presidency was harmful to race relations in the United States.

Not everyone on the right, however, views Obama negatively; Never Trump conservatives such as MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Washington Post columnist Max Boot have said that history will see Obama's presidency much more favorably than Donald Trump's four years in office.

On Juneteenth 2023, the conservative website The Bulwark celebrated the holiday by publishing, in article form, part of a speech Obama made on December 9, 2015. The former president emphasized that if the United States is going to progress as a nation, it needs to learn from its past — including the painful parts. And The Bulwark believes that Obama's "powerful remarks" are still relevant today.

"At its heart, the question of slavery was never simply about civil rights," Obama explained. "It was about the meaning of America, the kind of country we wanted to be — whether this nation might fulfill the call of its birth: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,' that among those are life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Obama continued, "President (Abraham) Lincoln understood that if we were ever to fully realize that founding promise, it meant not just signing an Emancipation Proclamation, not just winning a war. It meant making the most powerful collective statement we can in our democracy: etching our values into our Constitution. He called it 'a king's cure for all the evils.'"

Lincoln issued, by executive order, the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 during the U.S. Civil War. But it wasn't until June 19, 1865 that the Union Army declared the end of slavery in Texas. Juneteenth remembers that day.

Obama, during his 2015 speech, argued that that honoring the United States' "long arc of progress" shouldn't mean overlooking its racist past — a point he is still making in 2023.

"We would do a disservice to those warriors of justice — (Harriet) Tubman, and (Frederick) Douglass, and Lincoln, and (Dr. Martin Luther) King — were we to deny that the scars of our nation's original sin are still with us today," Obama argued. "We condemn ourselves to shackles once more if we fail to answer those who wonder if they're truly equals in their communities, or in their justice systems, or in a job interview. We betray the efforts of the past if we fail to push back against bigotry in all its forms."

Read Barack Obama's speech on The Bulwark's website at this link.

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