Our local library is closed in celebration of Juneteenth, but it apparently can’t bring itself to say the actual words. So it calls it “the federal holiday.” You can bet it will say Independence Day when it comes to July 4.

This is a big deal. I realize there’s a lot of political pressure from white people who are upset by the inference that they are somehow to blame for slavery. Or that their children will “feel bad about being white.”

But we have to talk about this. Juneteenth is about celebrating the end of chattel slavery in the United States. And it’s an opportunity to talk about what has happened here since then — and not just to the Black community.

• African Americans have been systematically denied the opportunity to build wealth through real estate and other means of generational wealth accumulation;
• Native Americans continue having to fight for the right to raise their own children;
• African Americans systematically pay higher interest rates on mortgages than white people
• African Americans get worse health care and have worse health care outcomes than white people

This isn’t a yesterday problem. And it’s still a today problem because we won’t talk about yesterday.

I just gave a series of talks about my memoir, The Silk Factory: Finding Threads of My Family’s True Holocaust Story, and what struck me was that so many people in my audiences recognized one of the major tenets of my work: that what Holocaust survivors lived through has caused tremendous emotional harm to their children and grandchildren.

And yet we demand that Black descendants of slaves in the United States get over it, as if nothing had ever happened.

Another issue I raise in my memoir is that places that make an effort to acknowledge and come to terms with the past provide the kind of solace that accelerates healing.

For anyone who wants to see the United States thrive into the future, the path is clear: acknowlegement, atonement, and reconciliation will lead to a stronger social fabric and a better future for our children.