Juneteenth

As a white person, I’m so glad that Juneteenth is now a federal holiday. I want to address one of the only 14 members of the House (all GOP) who opposed it.

This is not at all replacing the Fourth of July. Not in the slightest. Juneteenth is one of the brighter moments in our history because it is when we celebrate that, as a country, we are able to correct a wrong. Slavery was deep-seeded. It was (wrongly) celebrated. It was the commercial backbone of half the country. Juneteenth is us celebrating that our country is an experiment, which means we must change direction when things aren’t right.

Yes, to celebrate this moment of correction demands us to remember and recall that for hundreds of years as colonies and as a country, we captured and enslaved hundreds of the thousands of people and shipped them to our shores. This same effort captured and enslaved around 12 million people. 12 MILLION! Not all went to the United States, but their labor absolutely contributed to our economic systems. We enslaved their children resulting in millions and millions of people enslaved in the “land of the free”.

As Marco puts it, slavery isn’t a dark moment in America, slavery was a dark era in America.

How can I celebrate the Fourth of July without acknowledging that our country isn’t perfect? It’s a sham if we pretend America’s democracy somehow insulates us from being wrong. By acknowledging the evil past and transformation away from it through the celebration of Juneteenth, it enhances the celebration of the Fourth of July that our country, founded on ideals not realized then and still not fully realized today, is able to become something better than we were founded, something better than enslaving people, something better than Jim Crow laws, something better than systematic racism.

The Fourth of July and Juneteenth are not in competition with each other. Juneteenth celebrates when, for the first time, the Fourth of July applied to enslaved people. The Fourth of July celebrates that we can have our Juneteenth moments when we’re open and honest about what’s wrong in our country because We The People are this country.

The 1776 Project or the 1836 Project—these attempts to pretend that America (or Texas) are great and glorious places beyond reproach is absolutely not American. By ignoring or whitewashing our history, we are preventing ourselves from critical examination of both what works in our country and what does not work in our country. Without that critical examination, we’ll never have future Juneteenth moments of correcting wrongs because we’ll be too ignorant to accept reality.