Juneteenth, Freedom, and the Futures We Imagine
Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, the day Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, and announced that enslaved Black Americans were free—more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. It is a celebration of liberation hard-won, but it is also a stark reminder of how long justice can be delayed, distorted, or withheld. Juneteenth lives in that tension: joy and grief, progress and unfinished work, freedom declared and freedom denied in practice.
As a writer of speculative fiction, I spend a lot of time thinking about what happens after the moment of change. What comes after the proclamation, the revolution, the new law, the new order. It’s one thing to announce freedom; it’s another to build a world that actually lives up to it. Juneteenth invites us to ask that question in our own time, and it is one of the reasons this holiday feels so important right now.
Juneteenth matters today because it exposes the lie that injustice simply ends when a document is signed or a policy shifts. Enslaved people in Texas continued to labor, suffer, and die under a system that had officially been outlawed, because those in power had no incentive to share the news that would free them. That gap between law and lived reality is not just history; it’s a pattern we still see in voting rights, housing, healthcare, environmental justice, policing, and more. Juneteenth calls us to pay attention to those gaps and to the people still waiting for their “news of freedom” to reach them in real, material ways.
For Black communities, Juneteenth is also a day of affirmation and joy—a time to honor ancestors, celebrate culture, and claim space in a country that has repeatedly tried to erase or diminish Black life. It is a celebration of endurance, creativity, and community-building in the face of systems that were designed to crush all three. That joy is not separate from the struggle; it is part of the resistance to being defined only by trauma.
So what does this have to do with a dystopian novel like Dominion: Ascension? When I imagined a world where power flips and a woman-led government rises after catastrophe, I was very aware that simply changing who sits at the top does not automatically create justice. In Dominion, the ruling class believes it is building safety and order after chaos. But as they centralize control over other people’s bodies, choices, and futures, they begin to replicate the very patterns of domination they claim to have escaped.
Juneteenth teaches us that freedom is not just about who holds power; it’s about what they do with it. It asks hard questions: Who still doesn’t know they’re “free” because of the way information, resources, and opportunities are controlled? Who is still living under the shadow of systems that exist in name only, but never really died? Who gets to celebrate, and who is still waiting for the reality to match the promise?
Honoring Juneteenth means more than posting a quote once a year. It can look like:
• Learning and sharing the fuller history of slavery, Reconstruction, and the long backlash that followed.
• Supporting Black authors, artists, educators, organizers, and businesses—not just in June, but as an ongoing practice.
• Examining the systems you participate in (schools, workplaces, faith communities, local governments) and asking where “delayed freedom” still shows up.
• Making room for joy: attending or organizing celebrations that center Black voices, stories, and traditions.
As readers and storytellers, we have a particular responsibility and opportunity. The stories we elevate shape what we believe is possible. Juneteenth urges us to uplift narratives that tell the truth about the past, refuse to sanitize the present, and still dare to imagine freer futures. That’s part of what I hoped Dominion would do: not to equate fictional oppression with real history, but to keep us asking how quickly “safety” can become control, and how deeply we need to interrogate any system that decides whose humanity is negotiable.
This Juneteenth, my hope is that we each find a concrete way to honor the day—through learning, action, support, or celebration—and that we carry that intention forward into the rest of the year. Freedom delayed is not freedom denied forever, as long as there are people willing to keep pushing, keep telling the truth, and keep imagining worlds where liberation is not an afterthought, but the foundation.