Juneteenth and Becoming a Decent Country

A Juneteenth celebration in Texas in 1900.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/18/juneteenth-celebration-events-protest-activism 

Earlier today I posted this on social media:

Making Juneteenth a national holiday and removing Confederate monuments are literally the least we could do toward becoming a decent country.

Before I explain what I meant (somewhat like the commentary on a Sanskrit sūtra), if you don't know what Juneteenth is, look into it. This is a decent place to start. A lot of people (especially white Americans) are wondering what Juneteenth is. There have been fabulous technological innovations in human history known as the internet and books. Check them out. And don't fall into the trap of assuming that because you haven't heard of something it either doesn't exist or can't be important.

Another prefatory issue: I debated whether to include a post on Juneteenth as a white American. I didn't grow up with the holiday. I probably didn't even know about it until I was in college. So you're probably better off listening to Black Americans about Juneteenth.

Jamelle Bouie has an interesting point in his column on Juneteenth.

Juneteenth may mark just one moment in the struggle for emancipation, but the holiday gives us an occasion to reflect on the profound contributions of enslaved black Americans to the cause of human freedom. It gives us another way to recognize the central place of slavery and its demise in our national story. And it gives us an opportunity to remember that American democracy has more authors than the shrewd lawyers and erudite farmer-philosophers of the Revolution, that our experiment in liberty owes as much to the men and women who toiled in bondage as it does to anyone else in this nation’s history.

Here are some tweets I've been thinking about today.

So prefatory remarks complete, here's some commentary on my post. I think Juneteenth should be a national holiday. But, much like the holiday itself in the senses indicated above, this holiday itself is not the end of the freedom struggle for African Americans. As Bouie points out in his article, this struggle began in the 17th century and did not end in 1865. But also, recognition of this important part of American history is important for all Americans. African American history is American history. The horror and brutality of slavery is part of our history, one that I don't think we as a nation have ever really grappled with in an open and honest way. And we all suffer for it.

White supremacy encourages white Americans to think of public goods like education and healthcare as things we might accidentally give to "undeserving" Black people. And we all suffer for it. It gives us voter ID laws and draconian restrictions on voting rights. And we all suffer for it.

Juneteenth is special for many Black Americans in a way that it's not for me. I probably don't fully understand because I lack that lived experience. I acknowledge that.

Making Juneteenth a national holiday would be one small step toward making this a decent country for all Americans. We've never been a decent country, so there's something subversively science fictional about this idea. But it is an idea worth striving for.

Most Confederate monuments in the US were erected during the Jim Crow era. For example, a "Confederate cemetery" near where I live in Chattanooga has monuments that were built in the 1910's and 1920's. Do these monuments exist to remind people about history? Yes, but in doing so they were part of a wave of terrorism against African Americans that lasted for almost 100 years.

Okay, sure, someone might object, but surely today they serve a historical function. Reply: But what is that history? Wealthy white generals who started a war that killed 500,000 Americans for the purpose of preserving their ownership of almost four million Black Americans? But, the objection may continue, wasn't it about states' rights? Reply: Yes, but states' rights to do what, exactly? Own human beings?

But, the objection may continue, these are about preserving our history. We have monuments to the Holocaust to remember that history. Reply: Yes, but they in no way celebrate this history. I visited Auschwitz in 2018. It was not celebratory. You go with a guide, who puts everything in context. It is an intense and draining experience. There are no statues of Hitler on horseback.

We should have memorials to the Civil War dead, like some of those that already exist in my area. We should have memorials to millions of human lives destroyed by slavery and lynchings (like the memorial to the victims of lynching in America located in Montgomery, AL). But I don't think we need to celebrate the people who contributed to causing all of this suffering.

But, the objection continues, we need to remember history and heritage! Reply: I repeat what I said earlier: There have been fabulous technological innovations in human history known as the internet and books. Check them out. And don't fall into the trap of assuming that because you haven't heard of something it either doesn't exist or can't be important.

And I'll add: As someone who grew up in the Midwest and now lives in the South, I'm sensitive to the ways that the rest of the country denigrates the South. There are many great things about the South (food, hospitality, a laid back attitude, diversity, a rich history of anti-racism and labor organizing, nice winters, etc.), but leading an insurrection to preserve ownership of human beings is not one of these great things. And to my Northern kin: Don't be smug about this. There has been plenty of racism up North. That internet and those books I mentioned can help. And of course George Floyd was killed six blocks from where my Grandma lived when I was a kid, and that sparked a global uprising.

The legacies of slavery continue throughout our entire country, partly because we have never as a country come to grips with that history. And I hope that Juneteenth could be a small part of doing so as we struggle to become a decent country for all Americans.

Just because I love LeVar Burton, here's how I'll end.