Juneteenth should be a day for truth-telling, not just celebration. It should remind us that freedom delayed is still freedom denied and that the fight for liberation did not end in 1865. For Black women, that fight continues every time policymakers and politicians treat care as invisible labor, extract from their communities, and leave them to carry the burden of holding everyone else together. With the occurrence of the nation’s 250th anniversary, we have an opportunity here to build a new future that blossoms from the understanding that taxes are a form of communal care.
That is why we need to rethink not just access to care, but how we build a tax system that allows for a freer future. Our new report at Maven Collaborative shows that Black women do not see care as a private burden or a sentimental ideal. They describe it as communal, reciprocal, intergenerational, and liberatory. They say care is safety on the job, in their homes, and in their communities. They say care is economic equity. And they say, plainly, that Black women need care too, not just the expectation that they will keep giving it.
Reforming our tax code is the simplest way to get this place. It is one of the most powerful tools we have to decide what kind of society we want to live in. Right now, it often does the opposite of what liberation requires. It rewards wealth over work, treats caregiving like a private problem, and leaves Black women and their families with too little support and too many impossible choices. Juneteenth is about freedom, and the tax system should be built to make that freedom material, not solely symbolic.
The old saying that death and taxes are life’s only certainties has always felt incomplete to Black women. For too many of us, the certainty has been a system that asks us to give more than we receive. It is a system that penalizes caregiving, privileges marriage and wealth over labor, and continues to undervalue the work that keeps households, neighborhoods, and communities alive. That is not an accident. It is a set of policy choices that reflect whose needs matter and whose do not.
Our research also makes clear that care is not a private burden and not a soft add-on to the economy. Care is a public responsibility. It is also not a role assigned by biology or destiny. Too often, Black women are expected to carry the weight of care labor while being denied the resources, rest, and recognition that holistic care requires. That is why we argue for a different frame grounded in communal care: one that treats the economy as something we create and shape, not something that simply happens to us.
Black women have already shown what that remaking looks like. They have built economies of communal care at the margins when government failed to show up. Mutual aid societies, co-ops, collective farming, lending circles, and credit unions were not side projects. They were survival strategies and blueprints for a different kind of economy. Black women helped build the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Program, understanding that hunger was a barrier to learning and dignity. Food was the entry point, but the larger goal was always bigger: to meet people’s needs while building collective power. Johnnie Tillmon, who helped reframe welfare as a matter of dignity and survival, understood that liberation is not abstract; no woman can be free until she has the material support to stand on her own and care for herself and her family with dignity.
This history matters because it shows that care has never been only an individual obligation. We currently have glimpses of what it looks like when public resources are used to match this reality. In 2022, voters in New Mexico approved a constitutional amendment to use a slice of the state’s Land Grant Permanent Fund to expand early childhood education and public education, dedicating hundreds of millions a year to children. The state removed income limits and co-pays for childcare assistance, making childcare effectively universal so families can get the care they need without being pushed into impossible choices between rent and daycare.
In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently levied a tax on the second homes of billionaires. Now, his administration is showing what it looks like when government treats care as infrastructure: the city is opening its first free childcare seats for several thousand city workers, putting as much as $20,000 a year back into working families’ pockets, which is exactly the kind of tangible relief a tax system rooted in care could make possible.
That is taxes as care in action.
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We also saw that action with the expanded Child Tax Credit, too. For half a year, the existing credit was enhanced and leveraged to reduce child poverty at a record rate, while recognizing caregiving as essential work. It was a policy that put people first, rather than special interests and oligarchs infamous for evading taxes.
And yet that expansion was allowed to expire while tax cuts and loopholes that overwhelmingly benefit wealthy, largely white households were made permanent. The quiet violence of our tax code shows up here, too, in who gets certainty and who gets temporary help that’s yanked away, in whose wealth is locked in and whose safety is negotiable every budget season.
Policy is the way we publicly show what matters to us—in other words, how we care for each other. Care is safety on the job, in the home, and in the community. Care is protection from poverty. Care is the ability to move through the world freely without the barriers that kept down previous generations. Care is the recognition of Black women’s labor, not just in paychecks but in dignity.
That is the policy vision we should be advancing on Juneteenth. Not a tax system that continues to subsidize extraction and inequality, but one that funds childcare, healthcare, housing, paid leave, and public goods that make dignity possible. Not a framework that treats Black women as the default caregivers for a country that refuses to care back, but one that recognizes Black women’s labor, leadership, and vision as central to our collective future. A new care infrastructure must be well resourced and reparative of past harm, because anything less simply reproduces the same inequities in softer language.
Taxation has moral stakes. Taxes are not simply money collected by the government but one of the central ways that a society decides what it owes its people. A nation’s fiscal choices reflect its belief system. Right now, the tax code tells us that only wealth, and the wealthy, deserve reward.
Our research points toward a different future. It tells us that care can be a means for liberation, generational wealth, and joy. It says safety for one community only comes when all are safe and cared for. It says we must reject individualism and embrace a future that is communal and reciprocal rather than transactional. Those are not just insights about care. They are a roadmap for public policy and a challenge to anyone trying to claim that care is secondary to the real work of politics. Care is the work. Justice is the work. Liberation is the work.
On Juneteenth, we should be clear about what freedom requires now. It requires a tax system that makes care a collective responsibility rather than a private burden. It requires lawmakers to stop designing policy around extraction and start designing it around reciprocity. Black women have offered us the vision for how to get there. They are calling for safety, dignity, representation and a government that invests in the conditions that make freedom real. They want to move through the world without the barriers that kept down past generations. They want to live in a society where care is not something they are expected to give endlessly without return.
Juneteenth is the moment to say that those demands are not peripheral. They are the heart of liberation.
