It's Juneteenth weekend.
I've been thinking about how to share a thought about Juneteenth 2022. I guess I'm *grateful* for Senator Chuck Grassley's offering which set me off.
Juneteenth presents us with an opportunity to tell the truth about enslavement (and the end of it). Surprising exactly no one, men like Chuck Grassley aren't about to do that lest they be accused of telling the truth, oh the horror! or espousing the tenets of the dreaded critical race theory at worst. The truth is that "slavery" didn't end in 1865, the Emancipation Proclamation had ended it two and a half years earlier. When Chuck talks about an "historic day", he really ought to be ready to talk about all the associated history, not just the piece he's comfortable discussing. But, of course, no.
Like so many other aspects of Black history in America, Juneteenth is a story of Black survival in the face of White oppression. If we were serious about facing ourselves squarely in the mirror, we would be taking 19 June as an opportunity to do just that. Juneteenth is not about "Yay, White people freed the slaves!", the subtext of Grassley's tweet, but rather it's about "Damn, White people kept Black people enslaved for 2.5 whole damn additional years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed?!". (The Historical Legacy of Juneteenth)
I get that non-melanated folks want to celebrate Black freedom and their ancestors' part in it - even - though on the flip side they are very quick to disclaim any responsibility for the peculiar institution itself or any of its downstream effects - but on this day, celebration ain't theirs to do. Black people get to do the celebrating. White folk frankly need to take the day to sit with their ancestors' perfidy in holding Black people in continued bondage, despite losing a war and a Presidential proclamation declaring the enslaved to be free.
I'm of the view that pretending that a moment in history is triumphal for everyone equally is a huge part of America's current problem. Juneteenth represents an opportunity for us to face how US history impacts groups differently; indeed, how history affects even groups within groups differently.
We can't (or shouldn't) keep pretending that we've all felt the impact of historical events in anything approaching the same way. That this is harmful to the body politic should be self-evident by now. The proliferation of threats of violence against election workers? Yeah, that's a direct outcome of our cherry-picking approach to history. Threats such as these are nothing new (e.g. Mississippi burning) and the consequences are also well known. And yet we wander around singing our "This is not who we are" song. Second, the repeat of this ugly and dangerous behavior is a consequence of our willful ignorance of our history and our thoroughly questionable claim that this is a mature "democracy". [Anytime vast swathes of your population have only recently gained access to the ballot box (1965 for Black and other minority groups and far more recently for Native Americans), you might want to reconsider whether "democracy" is an accurate moniker.]
The only way out of the dark tunnel in which we currently find ourselves, where the racial animus pot is bubbling over (see Charlotte, El Paso, Buffalo and Uvalde), is through honest reflection on our shared past. That begins with telling the truth about who we've been and what has been done in our name. If Senator Chuck's tweet is anything to go by, we're not quite ready to do that yet.
