My Juneteenth Isn’t Your Juneteenth
by Valerie Morales
Ignoring white supremacy while applauding black liberation doesn’t take much talent. Just privilege, denial, and an entitlement culture that normalizes racial angst. For many whites, even the woke set, black liberation is embraced only if its victims have obediently waited their turn.
It perfectly illustrates the problematic aesthetic of those Juneteenth celebrations that water down American cruelty and ignore white lies. The ask is hypocrisy: glorify one thing while forgetting something else.
I remember Juneteenth before it was a political prop or a holiday signed into law and before white women approached me in the market to express their approval. Black families like mine celebrated Juneteenth in a similar fashion to that first celebration in Galveston, Texas after an army of 2,000 came marching through town telling slaves they were free.
“The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free" the army preached throughout Galveston.
A year later the former slaves ritualized their liberation with barbecues and hymns and some even recited the Emancipation Proclamation. Invisible and in trauma for 11 generations, in a southern state that objectified and ruined their bodies and psyche and kept them in bondage, Texas slaves were vindicated, their subjugation rejected at large. One historian referred to Juneteenth celebrations in 1866 as a “second Christmas.”
Like many black families, my family celebrated in a similar fashion as those un-enslaved Texans. The grill was going, music was popping, uncles and aunties at the backyard umbrella table arguing politics, gossiping. No one recited the Emancipation Proclamation but we acknowledged our ancestors and the racial threat that defined their lives and their survivorship. But it was the lie of Juneteenth that kept me tethered to the story’s evil. Slaves were kept in bondage after slavery ended. I couldn’t just let it go that white people kept black people oppressed, barbarized, and in the dark. I can’t celebrate Juneteenth without acknowledging the virulent system of ownership that kept the enslaved in servitude because of whom it benefited.
Two days before Juneteenth became a national holiday, I was in a grocery store in a rural midwestern town when a white customer came up to me and told me “Congratulations.” I didn’t know what the hell she was congratulating me for. All I was doing was trying to buy a cake for a small dinner party. I stared at her with a crazy look on my face, glad I was wearing a mask to hide my racial weariness. Then she said “I am so happy for you. Biden signed that bill.”
Happy for me? Really? Happy for me? I let that marinate a bit. Happy for what? Her seeping joy felt absurd. I suppose she thought she was being an ally and that I would beam at her newly discovered information of me that, naturally, put her in the middle of what she expected my experience was, not knowing Juneteenth as a holiday is nothing more than passing out crumbs to people who are starving. She assumed that black skin folks are an intractable box of tears and we all agree on the same things. Because she approved of the holiday, I was given permission to rejoice.
Juneteenth has changed ownership. It used to belong to a tight-knit family of cousins but now it has been digitized, popularized, simplified, and whitened. Those embracing slave liberation who can’t admit white supremacy’s tainted fingerprints is my problem with the holiday. Ditto those on the street selling Juneteenth t-shirts so they can make a buck.
A federal holiday doesn’t heal the generational wounds of slavery trauma. It doesn’t teach facts, such as 250,000 Texans toiled while 3 million of their skinfolk were free. Juneteenth the holiday continues to paper over the maliciousness of Texas farmers who lied so slaves could work the crops without compensation. And it offers zero dollars in reparation for those two years of illegal servitude.
Juneteenth the federal holiday is not a singular victory, it isn’t a victory at all. It’s not a reckoning. No black person’s life has improved because federal workers get to stay at home every June 19th. It doesn’t improve voting access, repair housing insecurity, heal health disparities. It’s a day off for some. And a historical symbol for others.
According to Gallup, 31% of white people knew what Juneteenth was before the make it a holiday gathered momentum. Another flashpoint in the two realities: we have to learn their history but they are ignorant by choice about ours. This sudden glee that something monumental has been accomplished for black people when the George Floyd Policing Act is floundering and the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act has bled out and Breonna Taylor is still dead (and with no arrests), is revolting. It’s like laughing at a funeral.
A year ago racial protests burned cities but the most popular movie on Netflix- for two days- was The Help, a movie fetishizing white affluence and black servitude. Whites are fond of diminishing the brutality that people of color endure by embracing a nostalgia that doesn’t exist, a history that they refuse to acknowledge, and a system that perpetuates inequalities, trauma, and affliction. They prefer us in obedience to them, oblivious of the psychological cost of our silence.
Juneteenth was grievous as much as it was a God-send. The enslaved were lied to and during those two years of bondage that was frankly illegal, there were losses, rapes, murders, sufferings that couldn’t be undone. There were unspeakable things.
Recently my 83-year-old mother watched the movie “The Trial of the Chicago 7” and reminisced about her activism. During her lunch hour in the year 1968 she went into downtown Chicago to protest the war, racism and sexism. There’s a scene in the movie where protestors are chanting Whose Streets? Our Streets!! Whose Streets? Our Streets!!
Juneteenth was our street once upon a time.
My mother doesn’t understand the why of a federal holiday that won’t translate into voting access, health equity, and education reform. I explained to her that it maintained the white savior complex; their comfort is a national priority.
I am reminded of former slave Frederick Douglas who once told a captive audience that he had in his possession “some of the very soil on which I first trod.” It is that same racist soil that Douglas claimed as belonging to him that is not in our possession, that we cannot affirm as our own, and that by design, keeps us invisible.
The same politicians who tried to decertify our vote have appeased us with a holiday many of us didn’t ask for. We are being codified so we won’t burn things down when racist systems remain intact, when nothing is done about policing, rape, inequities. The point is to keep us silent while we are feasting on crumbs.
