Happy Juneteenth!
It’s nice to not have a conflicted holiday. I mean, you can probably GET conflicted about it – you could probably get frustrated that most people don’t know what it IS, you could get frustrated that plenty of people still don’t CARE what it is. I’m sure there’ll be an uptick in racist hate crimes around the country because there’s people around the nation still captured by that mindset, casting around for a reason to keep themselves divided and angry. The country’s relationship with race, and slavery in particular, is fraught and any holiday coupled with Blackness in America’s probably going to generate some angst – but when it comes down to it – it’s a CELEBRATION. It’s not a memorial day, it’s not the day someone died, it’s not the birthday of someone who was killed. It’s not celebrating a controversial historical figure. It’s not linked to a religion that may or may not be mad if you celebrate things the “wrong” way.
Happy Juneteenth! It even just SOUNDS like a fun kind of day.
Now, I’m not saying it shouldn’t be spent with some contemplation a’foot in your mind. And not just from the White Guilt angle, but trying to even half-imagine what it might’ve been like to suddenly have slavery abolished – whether from an enslaved person’s point of view saying “oh, uh… I hear I’m supposed to get PAID for this now? Thanks? No, put down the whip, that’s illegal and I’ve just got to find a law officer who cares to report it to…” – a completely legal but apparently quite self-actuated emancipation – or for the slave owners who, whether intentionally cruel or not, had several hundred years of lineage and precedent for treating Blacks as property, overnight being expected to revise that perspective, update the books, figure out wages, AND be happy about it. Slavery couldn’t and wouldn’t stop on a dime and I think that anyone who’s able to remove themselves from the timestream and look upon America from the outside, somewhere with a couple of hundred years’ perspective even beyond our own, would think it’s pretty obvious that the reverberations of four hundred years of racial denigration, commodification and capitalist horror would still be echoing at LEAST 160ish years later…
I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to wrap your brain around all that and more – but I’m also saying that today should be a happy one. Be grateful we got THAT far. Be happy we’ve gotten THIS far. Be happy to go further.
Happy Juneteenth.