Dear CEO, this is how you can help Black people.

Dear CEO,

I loved my Juneteenth celebration. This year, it hit a lot different for obvious reasons, but if you aren’t sure…all the recent social transgressions taking place.

While I typically use Juneteenth as a day of reflection of how far we have come, I can’t help but to focus on where we, Black people, are and how much further we have to go. I only see how we are still subjected to the remaining residue of slavery and the institutions it supported.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what is progress as it relates to race relations and systemic oppression. What does freedom and equality really entail?

Physicist and philosopher, Philip B.Smith, wrote —

Rather than ethical incompatibility, an essential concordance between freedom and equality: for no one in a community can be really free where great inequality prevails.

My freedom is an illusion because while technically Black people were considered “free” in the United States as of June 19th, 1865 — we are still subjugated to great inequality; the greatest of which is the economic wealth gap.