Juneteenth 2026: From Baldwin to Barack and Michelle and Bell

“America never was America to me.”
– Langston Hughes

The Reflecting Pool has been remade. It once reflected the skies and crowd, hearing the words of Martin Luther King, Jr, in that most famous day that preceded Voting Rights, Civil Rights, Immigration Rights, Women’s Rights, LGBTQIA Rights. The Pool once reflected the hopes of the inspired, in America’s Second Revolution. Our lives. But this reflecting pool has been remade, perhaps because our would-be King did not like what it witnessed and knew. Perhaps he wished to expunge it of memory, as he wishes to expunge the nation of conscience. Like Narcissus, he wanted to see only himself when he looked at it. At America.

But Nature abhors a lie. Abhors the vacuous, fatuous lie called Donald Trump. He repainted it “American Flag Blue,” and experts predicted what soon became true. The blue raised the temperature of the water, and invited an algal bloom. The 2,030 by 167 foot rectangular pool between the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument turned Emerald City Wizard Green. Perhaps aptly, in this age of Donald, green is the color of America’s truest Constitution, the one everyone carries or would like to carry in their wallet. But the revealing green gaffe proved embarrassing, and a thousand gallons of hydrogen peroxide were poured in, perhaps in an attempt to bleach the pool blonde, like our Narcissus’ fake hair. It’s unclear how many ducks were burned.

Indeed, ducks did die.

Soon enough, though, the thin blue coat of paint at the bottom of Don’s swamp peeled off in patches, and the Emperor’s New Clothes were revealed, once again.

Nature abhors lies, but her evolution struggles with them. An industry of patches supports the survival of lies. They are tenacious. But in the end, they will come undone. They will peel away, revealing the sturdier bedrock of truth.

The Reflecting Pool - is the Rejecting Pool, the harbinger of the greater rejection of Trump to come. Doctor Jesus will not walk on this water.

Just a week before, a UFC cage match on the South Lawn of the White House was the stunt designed to patch the POTUS’s lie. I’d recently seen The Mandolorian and Grogu, and part of me wished that the cage match would end like the monster brawl on the planet Shakari, when the containment fails, and the spectators become sport. Alas, nature on our planet will have to be more subtle in her plot. But the analogy holds. Those who have been forced to fight for entertainment of “masters” will throw off their chains in rebellion. We will free ourselves from mental slavery - “none but ourselves can free our minds.”

Slavery and freedom are constant through-lines in history, and the contrasting visions are stark at America 250. On the one side, a UFC Cage Match, unnecessary war, and failed vanity makeovers. On the other, we have the official opening of the Obama Presidential Center on Juneteenth, 2026.

I have spent my Juneteenth weekend basking in Baldwin, Barack, Michelle, and famous Black quotations compiled by Janet Cheatham Bell - and America, you have won me. If newly freed Blacks, and even those yet unfreed, could commit themselves to the best of your vision, the best of their vision - who am I to refuse the call? If I am shackled, it is only to your sun, which still holds promise, even at this late date.

James Baldwin declared sixty years ago that “America is a criminal nation,” and now America has a literal criminal in charge, in war crimes to sexual offenses to flagrant corruption. In the film Baldwin’s N——r, he asks “why did America need a n——r?” A criminal needs someone to rob and harm. A psychopath needs someone to kill. A cruel mind needs to expel its hatred and misery onto another, rather than cultivate the power to heal itself from within. Insecurity, precarity, and fear need someone to project themselves onto. A paranoid belief in a dangerous world needs someone to constellate that belief on. Abusive power needs to have someone to abuse. The suffering habitual conflict-mind needs a victim, someone to blame. Sad to say, apparently nearly half the country is in continuity and complicity with Mr. Trump’s cruelty and scheme of suffering, rather than opposed.

At best, I suppose, he and they are a prompt for our side’s response and growth.

And still we rise. Cue the other side of the split-screen.

I watched Michelle and Barack Obama’s speeches from Chicago on June 18, and felt my chest heave and my throat catch. We are this too. We helped build this. Yes, the Obama presidency wasn’t perfect, and in important ways fell short - but oh, what I wouldn’t give to bring back those days of sanity, empathy, and commitment to the greater good. I think we still can. Yes we can, as we said in 2008.

I also read Janet Cheatham Bell’s Still Rising, and was inspired by the Black community’s wisdom of love and struggle. W. Kamau Bell you have quite a mother! Thank you for pointing me in her direction! I’ll be purchasing another copy of her book to put in my waiting room!

A sample:

“TO PLUNDER A people of everything, you must plunder their humanity first…. There is an insidious cost to this—a man invents a monster to justify his brutality, only to find the monster is within.
– TA-NEHISI COATES

“NO PERSON IS your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.”
- ALICE WALKER

“WHEN SOMEBODY SHOWS you who they are, believe them the first time.”
- MAYA ANGELOU

“WHEN YOU LOVE someone you love their journey.”
- ALICIA KEYS/Alicia Augello-Cook Dean

“REMEMBER, TO HATE, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you’re afraid of the other side of the coin—to love and be loved.”
- JAMES BALDWIN

“HATE IS REALLY just fear in a different octave.”
- MICHELE NORRIS

“Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love.”
- MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

I’ll be returning to this book (or Bell’s many other books) regularly - but there is so much wisdom, and emotional and intellectual wealth, in Black America. Black conscience is the spine of America, and it is the bedrock of truth which will out the lie. We must rest on it, this Juneteenth and throughout the year. We must recommit ourselves to its ideal, connected to the ideals of all humanity, yet forged through in the most brutal psychological and physical struggle known to humankind. That “philosophy” - that lie - that holds one race superior and another inferior.

It must be “finally - And permanently -Discredited - And abandoned.”

Then, only then, will America be America – to all of us.

FULL | Michelle Obama's speech brings Barack to tears: 'You gotta look at me'

FULL | Barack Obama delivers heartfelt speech at grand opening of new presidential center

A Conversation With James Baldwin: This edited version of "A Conversation With James Baldwin" contains the entire interview with Baldwin from "Perspectives: Negro and the American Promise."

Full Film & More: Take This Hammer (1964) Author and activist James Baldwin meets with members of San Francisco’s African American community in 1963. Escorted by Youth For Service’s executive director, Orville Luster, Baldwin is intent on discovering “the real situation of Negroes in the city, as opposed to the image San Francisco would like to present.” KQED produced this segment for NET, the predecessor of WNET.

Several films about James Baldwin are available on Kanopy, the Criterion Channel, and others. I was surprised to find that Raoul Peck’s outstanding film I Am Not Your Negro, nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar in 2017, is available for free on YouTube.

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Ravi Chandra is a psychiatrist, writer, compassion educator, and civilizational health shaman in San Francisco, and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He is the recipient of the 2025 Kun-Po Soo Award for Achievement in Asian American Psychiatry from the APA and APA Foundation. Here’s his linktree. Please sign up for updates via Substack where you can also support his educational and creative mission by becoming a free, paid or founding subscriber. For fourteen years, he was lucky to have his MOSF posts published by the Center for Asian American Media, and is now at work broadening and building a diverse creative community and coalition through reflecting on culture and psychology for East Wind eZine.See all the East Wind posts here. He writes from the metaphorical intersection of The Fillmore and Japantown in San Francisco, where Black and Asian communities have mingled since the end of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. He literally works there, between two Indian restaurants, go figure. His debut documentary was named Best Film (Festival Director’s Award) at the 2021 Cannes Independent Film Festival. The Bandaged Place: From AIDS to COVID and Racial Justice is available on-demand. His nonfiction debut, Facebuddha: Transcendence in the Age of Social Networks, won the 2017 Nautilus Silver Award for Religion/Spirituality of Eastern Thought. You can find him on Psychology Today, Medium, Twitter, Threads, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, SoundCloud, or better yet, in the IRL.