Honoring Juneteenth

Juneteenth has been around a long time, with some historians placing the first observances back in 1866. But it has only been a federal holiday since 2021 when Congress passed, and President Joe Biden signed, a law making the observance a national holiday.

The holiday is, of course, highly annoying to MAGA and other cultural conservatives who are certain that white men should be the center of everything. But Dear Leader has done his best to clamp down in his general assault on DEI. Consequently many businesses and the armed forces have pulled away from honoring the holiday. If schools were still in session, rest assured that the feds would be making sure that schools did not mark such a holiday that does. not properly center white guys.

My small town is marking Juneteenth with a festival in the park including food and dancing and music. It's a modest fun time and an appropriate way to honor the occasion.

I think painting it a Black or DEI holiday misses some of the point. It's an American holiday first and foremost because Black Americans are, in fact, Americans, and it is appropriate to mark the point at which they received a more complete version of citizenship to which they were always entitled. But it's also an American holiday because it marks a point at which the country tried to change directions and become a better version of what we had always promised to be. 

It's a complicated holiday. In the main, it is joyous in celebrating the freedom from slavery for an entire people. But it also marks the point at which the country stopped tolerating an odious and inexcusable evil. We should be able to celebrate the first part, but for many folks, it's hard to acknowledge what made the freeing of enslaved people necessary.

It's the root of all those laws against teaching divisive concepts or teaching anything that might make some (white) kids feel bad. The preferred culture panic narrative is "Yes, there was slavery but then se stopped, and yes, some bad individuals did some racism, but we stopped that, too." And since we stopped doing the bad things, it would be impolite and divisive to bring up the Bad Things part. That unwillingness to talk about what some of us did to others of us--what was done, who did it, and how they made themselves okay with it-- has given us a long history of wrestling inconclusively with racism problems. Banning the mention of such topics from school (and national parks and anywhere else) is not helping. 

Like many holidays, Juneteenth has the artificial quality of suggesting that an important thing happened all at once on one day. But there is nothing wrong with taking one particular day to honor an important event, even if that event was actually a long process. As a nation, we did some awful stuff, and then after we stopped, some folks had a very hard time getting past the ideas and attitudes that were used to justify the awful stuff in the first place.

Juneteenth reminds some of us that some uncomfortable conversations need to be had, but maybe not today, while some Americans are celebrating their emancipation. I do wish school was in session right now, but we may honor the day as best we can.