Holy days are political. They have always been designated based upon who has the power to say when the calendar is worthy of stopping, slowing down, and marking the life of someone important or something important. One of the long term racial reckonings we have had as a country is about holidays.
I think in the end, I simply feel—that as someone who loves the occasion for the cookout, family and friend time, and collective time off —that my lack of investment in prophesying the unholiness of holidays means I have transgressed in some way, that I am not politically holy enough, that I am not willing to “call a sin a sin” as it were.Juneteenth, for me, has always simply been a fact of life, something I commemorated before I knew I was doing it.
Mama always thought I underestimated her brilliance. I probably did. The way of Southern Black folks is often to teach without telling. My mother knew what I was up against, in my nearly all white classrooms. But doing real Black shit wasn’t a performance—it was a way of life. It wasn’t externalized for the public. It was simply who we were whether or not anyone was looking. I fundamentally prefer my politics and my religion to be exactly this way: the same inside and outside.
Juneteenth, the original one, happened because a significant swath of Confederates refused to acknowledge that they lost the Civil War. They simply returned home and engaged in white denialism, acting as though the carnage and destruction wasn’t real, as though their desired outcome was as good as truth. They couldn’t admit that things hadn’t gone the way they wanted, or thought they should, or felt entitled to.
The only thing that Juneteenth can and should mean to white people in 2021 is an opportunity to reckon with the 156-year history and very present threat of white denialism. This Black joy is in the lineage of a line that I read in a North Louisiana slave narrative from the 1930s: “Sometimes a group of slaves would leave the house and go on the branches to talk and have pleasure among themselves…” In slavery and in freedom, our people have gathered “on the branches,” to have pleasure among ourselves.The temptation, if I’m mildly disingenuous would be to tell you that Jack’s, the park up in the cut beneath a sea of pine trees, was our late 20th century brush arbor.
ProfessorCrunk Agreed. So many accommodations to the white losing side in that war. As a white, I would celebrate passage of true reparations - making every descendant of a slave = to a high middle class white person. Economic equality could end racism.
ProfessorCrunk I Totally agree!!
BeckyIB ProfessorCrunk RIGHT ON!
ProfessorCrunk AMEN
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