The actual day was June 19, 1865, and it was the Black dockworkers in Galveston, Texas, who first heard the word that freedom for the enslaved had come. There were speeches, sermons and shared meals, mostly held at Black churches, the safest places to have such celebrations.

The perils of unjust laws and racist social customs were still great in Texas for the 250,000 enslaved Black people there, but the celebrations known as Juneteenth were said to have gone on for seven straight days.

The spontaneous jubilation was partly over Gen. Gordon Granger’s General Order No. 3. It read in part, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”

But the emancipation that took place in Texas that day in 1865 was just the latest in a series of emancipations that had been unfolding since the 1770s, most notably the Emancipation Proclamation signed by President Abraham Lincoln two years earlier on Jan. 1, 1863.

As I explore in my book “Black Ghost of Empire,” between the 1780s and 1930s, during the era of liberal empire and the rise of modern humanitarianism, over 80 emancipations from slavery occurred, from Pennsylvania in 1780 to Sierra Leone in 1936.

There were, in fact, 20 separate emancipations in the United States alone, from 1780 to 1865, across the U.S. North and South.

In my view as a scholar of race and colonialism, Emancipation Days – Juneteenth in Texas – are not what many people think, because emancipation did not do what most of us think it did.

As historians have long documented, emancipations did not remove all the shackles that prevented Black people from obtaining full citizenship rights. Nor did emancipations prevent states from enacting their own laws that prohibited Black people from voting or living in white neighborhoods.

In fact, based on my research, emancipations were actually designed to force Blacks and the federal government to pay reparations to slave owners – not to the enslaved – thus ensuring white people maintained advantages in accruing and passing down wealth across generations..

Reparations to slave owners

The emancipations shared three common features that, when added together, merely freed the enslaved in one sense, but reenslaved them in another sense.

The first, arguably the most important, was the ideology of gradualism, which said that atrocities against Black people would be ended slowly, over a long and open-ended period.

The second feature was state legislators who held fast to the racist principle that emancipated people were units of slave owner property – not captives who had been subjected to crimes against humanity.

The third was the insistence that Black people had to take on various forms of debt in order to exit slavery. This included economic debt, exacted by the ongoing forced and underpaid work that freed people had to pay to slave owners.

In essence, freed people had to pay for their freedom, while enslavers had to be paid to allow them to be free.

Emancipation myths and realities

On March 1, 1780, for instance, Pennsylvania’s state Legislature set a global precedent for how emancipations would pay reparations to slave owners and buttress the system of white property rule.

The Pennsylvania Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery stipulated “that all persons, as well negroes, and mulattos, as others, who shall be born within this State, from and after the Passing of this Act, shall not be deemed and considered as Servants for Life or Slaves.”

At the same time, the legislation prescribed “that every negroe and mulatto child born within this State” could be held in servitude “unto the age of twenty eight Years” and “liable to like correction and punishment” as enslaved people.

After that first Emancipation Day in Pennsylvania, enslaved people still remained in bondage for the rest of their lives, unless voluntarily freed by slave owners.

Only the newborn children of enslaved women were nominally free after Emancipation Day. Even then, these children were forced to serve as bonded laborers from childhood until their 28th birthday.

All future emancipations shared the Pennsylvania DNA.

Emancipation Day came to Connecticut and Rhode Island on March 1, 1784. On July 4, 1799, it dawned in New York, and on July 4, 1804, in New Jersey. After 1838, West Indian people in the United States began commemorating the British Empire’s Emancipation Day of Aug. 1.

The District of Columbia’s day came on April 16, 1862.

Eight months later, on Jan. 1, 1863, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the enslaved only in Confederate states – not in the states loyal to the Union, such as New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri.

Emancipation Day dawned in Maryland on Nov. 1, 1864. In the following year, emancipation was granted on April 3 in Virginia, on May 8 in Mississippi, on May 20 in Florida, on May 29 in Georgia, on June 19 in Texas and on Aug. 8 in Tennessee and Kentucky.

Slavery by another name

After the Civil War, the three Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution each contained loopholes that aided the ongoing oppression of Black communities.

The Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 allowed for the enslavement of incarcerated people through convict leasing.

The Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 permitted incarcerated people to be denied the right to vote.

And the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 failed to explicitly ban forms of voter suppression that targeted Black voters and would intensify during the coming Jim Crow era.

In fact, Granger’s Order No. 3, on June 19, 1865, spelled it out.

Freeing the slaves, the order read, “involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them, become that between employer and hired labor.”

Yet, the order further states: “The freed are advised to remain at their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

The meaning of Juneteenth

Since the moment emancipation celebrations started on March 1, 1780, all the way up to June 19, 1865, Black crowds gathered to seek redress for slavery.

On that first Juneteenth in Texas, and increasingly so during the ones that followed, free people celebrated their resilience amid the failure of emancipation to bring full freedom.

They stood for the end of debt bondage, racial policing and discriminatory laws that unjustly harmed Black communities. They elevated their collective imagination from out of the spiritual sinkhole of white property rule.

Over the decades, the traditions of Juneteenth ripened into larger gatherings in public parks, with barbecue picnics and firecrackers and street parades with brass bands.

At the end of his 1999 posthumously published novel, “Juneteenth,” noted Black author Ralph Ellison called for a poignant question to be asked on Emancipation Day: “How the hell do we get love into politics or compassion into history?”

The question calls for a pause as much today as ever before.

Kris Manjapra, Professor of History, Tufts University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A 16th-century proverb advises: “It’s unwise to sell a bear’s skin before catching it.”

That’s one of the stories used to explain why, in modern times, Wall Street types call someone who sells a stock expecting its price to drop a “bear.” It follows that a market in which securities or commodities are persistently declining in value is known as a “bear market,” like the one U.S. stocks are experiencing now.

The opposite, when assets are steadily rising over a period of time, is a “bull market.”

In my money and banking classes, I teach students about the efficient market hypothesis, which states that stock prices are rational, in that they are always fairly priced based on available information. But when there are big swings in the stock market, it’s hard for my students and others to resist using more emotive terms like “bulls” and “bears,” which call to mind the “animal spirits” of investing.

So how do you know when you’re in a bear market?

The Securities and Exchange Control Commission defines a bear market as a period of at least two months when a broad market – measured by an index such as the S&P 500 – falls by 20% or more. When it rises by 20% or more over two months or more, it is a bull market.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index, which includes most of the most well-known U.S. companies, has declined about 24% since its its peak on Jan. 3, 2022.

Not everyone strictly follows this two-month rule. For example, in March 2020, when the S&P 500 plunged 34% in a matter of weeks due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many analysts still called it a “bear market.”

A milder form of a bear market is “correction.” During a correction, prices drop by 10% to 20% from the previous peak.

Some analysts estimate there have been 26 bear markets in the S&P 500 since 1928, excluding the one that began in 2022. The average length was 289 days, with a decline of about 36%. The longest was in 1973-74 and lasted 630 days.

There have been fewer distinct bull markets, with 24 in that period. They tend to last a lot longer, though, often for multiple years.

Why a bear market matters

A bear market may signal a recession is coming, though it’s not a perfect correlation. Since World War II, there have been three bear markets – out of a total of 12 – that didn’t precede a recession.

A bear market is bad news for anyone with a stock investment, whether it’s a direct stake in Apple or Walmart or a 401(k). The impact is particularly hard on recent retirees, who are seeing their nest eggs shrink just as they need to start withdrawing income from them.

In addition, entering a bear market can have a psychological impact on investors, creating a self-fulfilling cycle. Perceiving a bear market tends to prompt investors to sell even more, thus pushing prices down further and prolonging the pain.

Read other short, accessible explanations of newsworthy subjects written by academics in their areas of expertise for The Conversation U.S. here.

Vidhura S Tennekoon, Assistant Professor of Economics, IUPUI

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Whether or not you’ve heard of the chemical bisphenol A, better known as BPA, studies show that it’s almost certainly in your body. BPA is used in the manufacturing of products like plastic water bottles, baby bottles, toys and food packaging, including in the lining of cans.

BPA is one of many harmful chemicals in everyday products and a poster child for chemicals in plastics. It is probably best known for its presence in baby bottles due to campaigns by organizations such as Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families and Breast Cancer Prevention Partners.

An extensive body of research has linked BPA to reproductive health problems, including endometriosis, infertility, diabetes, asthma, obesity and harming fetal neurodevelopment.

After years of pressure from environmental and public health advocates, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration agreed in June 2022 to reevaluate the health risks of BPA. This is significant because a vast body of research has documented that BPA is leaching from products and packaging into our food and drink and ultimately our bodies.

What is BPA?

BPA is not only used in plastics and food and drink containers but also in pizza boxes, shopping receipts, liners of aluminum cans and much more. Scientists have found that BPA is an endocrine disruptor, which means it disrupts hormonal systems that support the body’s functioning and health.

Hormonal disruption is a particular problem during pregnancy and fetal development, when even minor changes can alter the trajectory of developmental processes, including brain and metabolic development.

Over the last two decades, public awareness about the risks led many companies to remove BPA from their products. As a result, studies have shown that BPA levels in people’s bodies appear to be declining in the U.S. However, a nationwide research team that I helped lead as part of a national NIH consortium showed in a recent study of pregnant women that the decline in BPA could in part be explained by the fact that BPA replacement chemicals have been on the rise over the last 12 years. And other studies have found that many BPA substitutes are typically just as harmful as the original.

As an environmental health scientist and professor and director of the University of California, San Francisco Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment who specializes in how toxic chemicals affect pregnancy and child development, I am part of a scientific panel that decides if chemicals are reproductive or developmental toxicants for the State of California. In 2015, this committee declared BPA a reproductive toxicant because it has been shown to be toxic to ovaries.

BPA and the FDA

BPA was first approved for use in food packaging by the FDA in the 1960s. In 2008, the agency released a draft report concluding that “BPA remains safe in food contact materials.” This assessment was met with pushback from many health advocates and environmental health organizations. The FDA claimed BPA to be “safe in food contact materials” as recently as 2018.

Meanwhile, since 2011, Canada and Europe have taken steps to ban or limit BPA in children’s products. In 2021, the European Union proposed “dramatic” decreases in BPA exposure limits due to a growing body of evidence linking BPA to health harms.

One of the major challenges to limiting harmful chemicals is that regulatory agencies like the FDA try to figure out the levels of exposure that they consider harmful. In the U.S., both the FDA and the Environmental Protection Agency have a long history of underestimating exposures – in some cases because they do not adequately capture “real-world exposures,” or because they fail to fully consider how even small exposures can affect vulnerable populations such as pregnant women and children.

Latest research

A large body of research has explored BPA’s effects on reproductive health. These studies have also revealed that many BPA substitutes are potentially even worse than BPA and have looked at how these chemicals act in combination with other chemical exposures that can also come from a variety of sources.

And while much attention has been paid to BPA’s effects on pregnancy and child development, there is also significant research on its effects on male reproductive health. It has been linked to prostate cancer and drops in sperm count.

In a study our research team conducted that measured BPA in pregnant women, we asked study participants if they knew about BPA or tried to avoid BPA. Many of our study participants said they knew about it or tried to avoid it, but we found their actions appeared to have no effect on exposure levels. We believe this is, in part, because of BPA’s presence in so many products, some of them known and some unknown that are difficult to control.

What you can do

One of the most common questions our staff and clinicians that work with patients are asked is how to avoid harmful chemicals like BPA and BPA substitutes. A good rule of thumb is to avoid drinking and eating from plastics, microwaving food in plastic and using plastic take-out containers – admittedly easier said than done. Even some paper take-out containers can be lined with BPA or BPA substitutes.

Our recent review of the research found that avoiding plastic containers and packaging, fast and processed foods and canned food and beverages, and instead using alternatives like glass containers and consuming fresh food, can reduce exposures to BPA and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals.

Research has shown that when heat comes into contact with plastic – whether water bottles, Tupperware, take-out containers or cans – BPA and other chemicals are more likely to leach into the food inside. One should also avoid putting hot food into a food processor or putting plastic containers into the dishwasher. Heat breaks down the plastic, and while the product might appear fine, the chemicals are more likely to migrate into the food or drink – and ultimately, into you.

We also know that when acidic foods like tomatoes are packaged in cans, they have higher levels of BPA in them. And the amount of time food is stored in plastic or BPA-lined cans can also be a factor in how much the chemicals migrate into the food.

No matter how much people do as individuals, policy change is essential to reducing harmful chemical exposures. A large part of our work at UCSF’s Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment is to hold regulatory agencies accountable for assessing chemical risks and protecting public health. What we have learned is that it is essential for agencies like the EPA and FDA to use the most up-to-date science and scientific methods to determine risk.

Tracey Woodruff, Professor of Environmental Health, University of California, San Francisco

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.