Juneteenth 2023

Banned Histories of Race in America

Honestly, Juneteenth was aggravating for me this year. I saw a lot of white people getting the new federal holiday off and a lot of Black folks working. The country really seems to believe that Juneteenth is about white people freeing Black people and I guess they gave themselves the day off, accordingly.

Now, if you’re unfamiliar, what actually happened was that enslaved Black people freed themselves so frequently and so consistently for so long that the Abolitionist Movement formed. Predating the country itself, the Abolitionist Movement was eventually met with the unimaginable violence of the Civil War, ending slavery in 1865. Sort of. Naturally, enslavers didn’t tell the enslaved right away. And slavery went on in one form or another for at least 80 more years… And that’s only if you don’t count that one section of the Thirteenth Amendment that continues to legalize slavery even now.

This is the pattern with virtually every mass political movement to happen in this country. Black people begin to organize, then racists take control and turn the cause into a white supremacist movement, weaponizing the issue against Black people. The racists never say that, of course. Usually it’s something about compromise or “this is just the first step” or some other cliché producing the same results. Those results are pain for Black people and destruction of the cause altogether.