Whitewashing Juneteenth
It's becoming just another day off work!
Ernest Owens takes to the Daily Beast to ask, “Can We Admit Mainstreaming Juneteenth Has Been a Disaster?“
On June 17, 2021, nearly a year after the murder of George Floyd, President Joe Biden thought it was a bright idea to make Juneteenth an official U.S. holiday—signing it into law, to be observed by all.
“Making Juneteenth a federal holiday is a major step forward to recognize the wrongs of the past,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), said at the time, “but we must continue to work to ensure equal justice and fulfill the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation and our Constitution.”
Sure, Chuck.
Growing up in Houston, Juneteenth—an event that commemorates June 19, 1865, as the day enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas, learned they were free (more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed)—was a Black holiday in my hometown.
I remember spending my summers down at Galveston Beach and watching the procession of decorated cars with live music proceed as the Jubilee parade commenced. I can still smell the tasty barbeque, remember the gallons of signature red soda passed around, and all that hot sauce doused on my plate as the red and blue Juneteenth flags were waved.
Juneteenth was our Fourth of July—a celebration which reminded me that the South still had something to say, and that Black people didn’t have to wait for the validation of our white peers to gather around our history.
Since the racial uprisings of 2020, this sacred holiday has now become mainstreamed into something that now feels whitewashed, co-opted, and highly performative.
It’s hard to witness something so personal in your life become ruined on the national stage—that’s the current case with Juneteenth.
I started to notice it last year when Walmart thought it was being progressive when they released a red velvet and cheesecake-flavored Juneteenth ice cream with a Pan-African decorated carton.
Fun fact: Juneteenth has never incorporated African themed colors/designs as part of its official flag (organizers use red, white, and blue to replicate the U.S. and Texas state flags)—Walmart just couldn’t help but pander to customers as a way to flex that they were recognizing Black people. The controversy led to the corporation to apologize and discontinue the line of tone-deaf ice cream, along with canceling other ill-advised Juneteenth-themed merchandise it was selling.
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In so many ways, the desire to mainstream Juneteenth has now led to much of its press and publicity being met with pandering or controversy. It reminds me of Black History Month, when perhaps there was a moment in time in which America tried to take the shortest timeframe of the year seriously to acknowledge the contributions of Black people. Or perhaps Juneteenth has quickly descended into the rainbow capitalism vibes of Pride month—during which more of the festivities are being monetized for high visibility, without any intentional focus on the community.
Skip Corporate Juneteenth Branding, Invest in Black People
So, great, more people know about Juneteenth—but how does that actually ensure the very freedoms and concepts of emancipation for Black Americans that the holiday speaks of?
For what it’s worth, symbolism will do nothing to liberate a marginalized group. At a time when racial disparities continue to worsen and white supremacy feels even more visibly prevalent—corporations and city/state governments bandwagoning on Juneteenth celebrations do very little to combat this reality.
As with Black History Month, I would like to see these powerful institutions actually put their money/policies/influence where their mouths are and let Black people celebrate Juneteenth in peace. Seriously, there are some things that should just be left alone.
I first learned that the Senate was even considering making Juneteenth a holiday two years and two days ago, when they did so unanimously. I first got the holiday off two days later—thus two years ago today—when President Biden signed it into law and put it into effect immediately. Then, as now, I’m at the beach. (The confluence of my short summer hiatus and all of the kids’ school or work schedules aligning is rather brief.)
People were already complaining about the commercialization of Juneteenth the second time it was a national holiday. In fairness to American capitalists, they simply didn’t have enough notice to commercialize it the first time. As I wrote then,
[C]ommercializing celebrations of events with deep meaning for people is a time-honored tradition.
Easter, the holiest day of the year for most American Christians, marking the resurrection of Jesus Christ after he died on the cross, is marked by weeks of sales of everything from chocolate bunnies to fashion accessories to kitchen appliances.
Memorial Day, on which we honor the Americans who gave the ultimate sacrifice in our nation’s wars, is marked by a three-day extravaganza of markdowns on everything from mattresses to hardware to personal electronics.
And that’s to say nothing of Christmas, on which there has been a longstanding war. It’s quite possible your local mall is already decorated for it. Almost certainly, toy companies are already marketing for it.
Rather obviously, our nation has a long history of maltreatment of its Black population. Our original sin of slavery lasted some 250 years and that was followed by roughly another century of Jim Crow. Things have improved markedly in the last half-century but the fact that a Black Lives Matter movement exists would seem a decent indicator we have a way to go. So, I get the notion that these events are somehow more sacred. But that’s just not how the world works.
The good news is that there’s nothing stopping Owens and others from putting on a Jubilee parade with all the trimmings. And, hell, maybe it’ll catch on—it sounds like a hoot.
And, while I get the desire for Black Americans, especially those whose families have been here long enough to have endured enslavement, to want to keep this day for themselves, there’s something to be said for its absorption into the broader culture. That Black history is American history should simply become instinctive.
Is there a war starting over Juneteenth?
One of the first things I hit googling “oestre,” the name of a pagan fertility goddess – her festival in spring for obvious reasons.
Eggs and bunnies (fertility symbols) look to me like they fit right in with the nature of the holiday.
And Easter eggs, but I suppose some people just like to complain.
As for resurrection, celebrations of Ceres, Dionysus etc. choose spring as a time of rebirth.
And speaking of long traditions, is not Christians repurposing pagan holidays a long tradition (Saturnalia, Yule as examples).
If one pushes to make something a national holiday (did the whingers so push, if not of course then it is merely whinging) then one has to expect it will indeed be nationalised and made generic.
This is rather a black Left secularist version of Christians whinging on about the commercialisatisation of Xmas.
If you’re going down the path you seem to want to go down you really need to show your homework on how and why President’s Day is bad.
Because it did not happen to you or your family is immaterial. It happened to Americans. We are Americans, all of us.
Seriously, fuck off with this does not matter to me bullshit. I declare Shenanigans!
You are preemptively cheapening national pause at our deepest sin.
It’s like painting over history. It happened. We need to deal with that above a cursory state.
All American holidays, with the possible exception of Thanksgiving, end up being loud, crass, commercial and drained of real meaning. Give an American any excuse and he’ll get drunk, dress like a buffoon, burn meat and make loud honking noises at any athletic event that presents itself.
I’m puzzled why Emancipation Day (April 16) isn’t a national holiday rather than Juneteenth, which is Texas-centric.
Most of my clients don’t even recognize this as a holiday, except for the one bank I do work for and the DC-based PR firm. I don’t even think our town government has this as a day off.
Do most US-based companies recognize this as a floating holiday? Meaning, employees are given X number of days off per year, and you can take the day or work it, depending on which holidays you follow?
My business that sells “Kiss me, I’m Irish” buttons in March is ready to produce “Kiss me, I’m Black” buttons. Yes, Americans turn any holiday into an occasion for frivolity unconnected to the underlying reason for the holiday. I’m not sure that this is all bad. I certainly like the Sexy Nurse costumes for Halloween. It is interesting that Washington crossed the Delaware on Christmas day 1776 because he thought the Hessian mercenaries would be celebrating the religious holiday in a frivolous manner. We were serious; they were goofy. We won.
@CSK:
Why not December 6, 1865, ratification date of the 13th amendment, when slaves in states that had been under Union control when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued were freed?
Though we don’t need another holiday in December so Juneteenth is a good alternative.
@CSK: I would say it is a Texas and Texas border state centric holiday. It’s always been “in”amongst the black activist crowd who sell it as the Black 4th of July. Personally, I’ll take the day off but feel no type of connection to the holiday. It simply wasn’t a big thing in the SE of the South.
Lincoln has taken a hit over the past 20 years in the Community as it’s become clear that he was an abolitionist-only. When I was in grade school there was still a good bit of Lincoln veneration—-now Lincoln “freeing the slaves” is explained with many qualifiers: His disbelief is black equality, his views on sending us back to Africa, the limited scope of the Emancipation itself.
Emancipation day as a holiday would be cringeworthy
@Michael Reynolds:
Not exclusive to America.
Thanksgiving, BTW, involves so much intrinsic consumer spending, as not to require further commercialization. Think of the small fortunes spent on lavish, large dinners for a lot of people. Not to mention the nationwide travel condensed into a few days, or the many NFL games played that day. Or the Macy’s parade.
On top of that, the day following thanksgiving is Black Friday. This is not a coincidence.
@Jen:
I would work Christmas weeks most years. I was single and did not need out of town travel.
At the time I worked for a mortgage bank in data analysis. Nothing happened. We kept the lights on. My boss was gone til Jan. 2. Her boss was gone. His boss was gone. All the way up the ladder to the CTO. No one was in charge for a week and a half. I kinda was.
We kept the lights on obviously but for seven hours of the day we invented our own gladiatorial games.
There was kickoff American football where you fold up a sheet of paper into a small flat triangle and attempt to to flick it through somebody’s thumb goalposts. One dude was running a D&D campaign – he as DM with drop-in, drop- out challenges out of his cube. My second experience with that. Dude was very cool!
I had two boxing nun hand puppets so we obviously had fights and a betting pool. Agreeing on the rules was the hard part. It got extremely convuluted. I as commissioner (owner of the puppets) had final say. I made some controversial rulings just to keep things intetesting.
Basically, between December 20 and January 2 nothing happens in US businesses besides keeping the lights on.
And those there during that time are mostly fucking about if my time taught me anything.
I had nowhere to go at Christmas and much preferred an extra week off in late July for an epic roadtrip.
@JKB:
Because Emancipation Day came first, in 1863. Most of the northern states abolished slavery between 1774 and 1804.
@Jim Brown 32:
All very good points.
Still fuming that election day is not a holiday…. Could’ve recognized the end of slavery and laws guaranteeing voting rights. That would add recognition of women’s suffrage as well in a two-fer.
One year Special Ed showed up on Christmas Eve. Special Ed was my boss’s boss. Special Ed was really stupid and mercurial.
Everyone who can be sent home sort of expects the gracious boss “send you home early” thing at about 1 P.M.
Special Ed did at 9 A.M. if you are going to send people home early don’t do it at 9. Folks just got here. Haven’t finished their first shitty office coffee.
Sending people home too early backfires. Everybody thinks “Well why did you even make me come in then?” Rightfully I think. But Special Ed had three families, two of them with kids, so he had places he needed to be soon.
Special Ed got fired next July. His ex, who used to be his assistant, ratted him out. He was getting kickbacks from a consulting firm he’d hired for the project I was working on. It mattered – his lackeys were decidedly sub-par and bollixing up the project. Possibly on purpose to extend the project. Contractors are paid hourly.
If I were running Marketing for African-Americans – and I note that I am not – I’d look for a celebratory date tied to something more positive than, ‘the end of slavery, the beginning of Jim Crow.’ This is still defining Black people in terms of their relationship with White people.
I have long maintained that the explosion of creativity in the African diaspora, particularly in music, stands alongside the Italian Renaissance. In about a century, give or take, Blacks in the US, but also in the Caribbean and Brazil, created basically every genre of music after Stravinsky. Blues, gospel, jazz, R&B, reggae, salsa, rock n’ roll, hip hop. The period defined as the Italian Renaissance lasted at least twice as long, and was mightily assisted by fabulously wealth patrons. Robert Johnson was not given his guitar by a Medici. Zero popes were helpful in the careers of Billie Holiday or Little Richard, while DaVinci, Michelangelo, Raphael et al were state-sponsored artists
I think the message of, “OMG, look what we created!” is better in just every way than, “Look what White people did to us.”
I want fireworks, parades, and the full push. I want monuments built throughout the country — at least as many as there have been monuments to the confederacy.
July 4th was about white slaveholders writing pretty words about equality. Juneteenth is the first major step for our nation in beginning to live up to those pretty words (about a hundred years later).
It’s only “Black history” if we forget that the Union army was pretty damned white, and that a hundred thousand Union soldiers died in battle (and about a quarter million injured, and an equal amount counted as casualties because of disease).
We should be honoring their sacrifice at the same time we are celebrating the freedom of the former slaves. And tying it into the greater struggle for equality in the US (still an ongoing struggle)
It might be co-opting the holiday a bit to add that white perspective, but we’re a majority white country (moving towards plurality) and a lot of those white people need to hear the message that they have a critical part to play in ensuring the rights of everyone, and that this is a part of our heritage.
Why Juneteenth as opposed to half a dozen other viable candidate days? It’s a good time of year for a BBQ. Wish it was in August, because it needs a holiday, and putting them in order helps tell a story, but what can you do?
Plus, anything that can be used as an opportunity to point out that Texas is the only state in the union to secede from two separate countries to protect slavery is a good thing. Remember the Alamo? They were fighting to protect slavery.
@Michael Reynolds:
Jim Crow didn’t start for a decade after the slaves were freed. It was a major backslide and abandoning the Reconstruction was one of the great shames of our country.
Anyway, I don’t think Juneteenth should be a “Black holiday” as noted above. But I’m all in favor of adding something else to celebrate the contributions of Black folk to our culture. I recommend the entire month of August that desperately needs something — and which would be mostly a good time for outdoor concerts. If LGBTetc can get a whole month for Pride, surely Black folks can get a month.
@Michael Reynolds:
For better or worse, MR, we are inextricably bound to each other in this nation. I believe a majority of us gets that; but, that loud minority made up of Klansters, ABers, Foundational Black Americans, and Black Hebrews (JFC) ain’t ever gonna let it go.
@Michael Reynolds:
It’s not a competition or zero sum game, we can walk and chew gum simultaneously. I doubt anyone would suggest to Jews that is “better” to celebrate their enormous cultural contributions than to remember/honor Holocaust victims, because doing so somehow ties them to Nazis. We can do both.
“Look what we survived, and how resilient we are,” is a very important message, and it is hugely important to remember and honor the sacrifices of survivors. Remembering slavery is crucial now, given the current attempts in certain jurisdictions to erase, downplay, or forget it. And black contributions are celebrated during the month of February, which is Black History Month.
@Gustopher:
February is Black History Month.
@DK:
I think Jews (and I am arguably one) have already incorporated a deep sense of accomplishment. I’ve told this story before, but on Twitter I saw a Black girl asking, in all sincerity, why people made a big thing out of Black music. And I was like, because it’s pretty much all music, and do you realize what that means, that a small, oppressed minority, in the face of violent repression, came up with jazz, blues, etcetera etcetera.
I was only around my Jewish grandparents occasionally, but I knew Einstein was ‘one of ours,’ and that we were very successful in law and finance and entertainment and medicine. Freud? Ours. Sam Goldwyn? Ours. And in sports, um, Sandy Koufax. And in terms of literature our contributions start with the best-selling book in human history. We have the ethnic pride thing down pretty well. Moses. Jesus. Spinoza. Bruce Springsteen.
I’m just saying maybe George Washington Carver and his peanuts are a bit less inspirational than Aretha Franklin or Prince or Sister Rosetta Tharpe or Jimi Hendrix or Beyoncé or or or. . .
@Michael Reynolds:
How about Dr. Charles Richard Drew.
@Michael Reynolds:
Lol again, why does it have to be a competition and a zero-sum game? We can celebrate and be inspired by *all* of these people and we can also remember our ancestors survived brutality. Either/or thinking may dominate with excessively online self-selected sample of Twitter users, but out here in real life among the normies that is not how people operate. We can walk and chew gum at the same time even if Twitter users can’t.
And the notion that the accomplishments of black cultural contributors like Tina Turner, Harry Belafonte, Aretha Franklin, LeBron James, and Beyoncé et al are somehow marginalized or underappreciated by black people is not grounded in reality.
@DK:
A short month where it is too cold for a lot of the celebratory community gatherings that something like Pride has.
Black folks got the short end of the stick.
And history isn’t quite the same as the cultural contributions. History is the Selma bus boycott and the like. Given the dominance of African-American music (and the music borrowing from that), as well as contributions to art, literature and film… they need more time.
History is boring, culture is fun. History is remembering, culture is celebrating.
ETA: Black History Month is overshadowed by Groundhog’s Day. (And Valentines Day)
ETA2: of course, if I find myself agreeing with MR, I might have to rethink my views. 😉
ETA3: The Black dominance in large parts of popular cultural forms reminds me of Rome conquering Greece, and then all Roman art and culture shifting to very Greek (plus arches — the Romans added arches). Nothing did more to expand Greek culture than to be absorbed into Rome.
@Gustopher:
Despite the bizarre insistence on stubborn either/or black vs white thinking by some (I’m guessing just to be argumentative for fun and giggles, on a boring Sunday lol), history and culture are inexorably intertwined, inseparable, and E) all of the above.
But it’s nice that people here celebrate black culture, which is American culture.
@DK:
When did I say or imply that it had to be either/or? It’s a matter of emphasis, audience and nuance. And effect.
In general I think leaning into victimhood is a mistake. I’m not an 11 year-old rape victim, I’m a guy who found true love, a career and wealth, all while living under an alias. I’ve got this syndrome and that issue and all sorts of whines I could get into, but why would I? To what purpose?
Same set of facts: I…sniff sniff…I was moved from place to place, always the new kid, never a real home, no stability, leaving friends, waaaah. Or, I’ve been everywhere, man, I got dropped in French school in 2d grade speaking no French and three months later I was number one in the class. Which version of reality do you think has served me better in my life? I could go on with examples. Single teen Mom. Drop out. Death threats. Probably mild Tourettes. Poverty. Jail. Homelessness. Oh, oh, the pity party I could throw for myself.
I could play either role, but what would it profit me to feel sorry for myself? I’m happy and have a wonderful life. Should I spend more of my time bemoaning the bad things in my life?
One makes a choice either to see life as tragedy or comedy. I’ve never understood the logic of choosing tragedy. Life is so much better if it’s funny.
Of course Juneteenth is being whitewashed.. I’d only be shocked if something else happened.
MLK day whitewashes MLK’s actual motives
@Argon:
But it’s not the end of slavery. Per the constitution, slavery is still allowed in these United States.
The 13th ammendment states:
So, if you want free labor in your county to harvest fruit, or build roads, you got it.
And if you have a problem with resources, you can just ask the judges to crank up the incarceration rate.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_States
Additional Reading: https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploitation-of-incarcerated-workers
@Liberal Capitalist: Conflating prison labor—people who have been convicted of serious felonies by a jury of their peers—and chattel slavery makes no sense to me.