Juneteenth properly understood is a worthy American holiday. However, it also reflects the Left’s attempt to make victimhood central to our nation’s historical narrative so as to effect a radical political transformation.
America’s newest holiday, Juneteenth, commemorates the end of slavery and the emancipation of African Americans. That is, obviously, a good thing and worthy of national commemoration. Yet, for reasons that are typically not well articulated, the holiday doesn’t sit well with many Americans, especially some political conservatives. Why?
Not, obviously, because these Americans are racists who support slavery or lament its demise. (Please. Let’s be serious.) Instead, the reason is inherent in the rationale put forth by many left-wing advocates for Juneteenth.
Racist Nation. To the Left, Juneteenth is another way to remind America of its sins and to heap opprobrium on the American founding. America, they insist, was founded upon slavery and genocide, and Juneteenth is another way to remind America of its allegedly racist founding and irredeemably racist past.
This, sadly, has become the dominant historical narrative in America today. It is what is taught in the schools, but it is far from universally accepted—and many of us on the Right beg to differ.
There’s also the fact that the Juneteenth is two weeks before July 4, Independence Day, and is officially called “Juneteenth National Independence Day.” For this reason, Charlie Kirk calls Juneteenth “a CRT-inspired federal holiday that competes with July 4th.”
CRT, of course, is Critical Race Theory, which is now being foisted upon young schoolchildren and it is pernicious.
CRT, as Andrew Sullivan observes, is designed
to cement the notion at the most formative age that America is at its core an oppressive racist system uniquely designed to exploit, harm, abuse, and even kill the non-white.
This can be conveyed in easy terms, by training kids to see themselves first and foremost as racial avatars, and by inculcating in them a sense of their destiny as members of the oppressed or oppressor classes in the zero-sum struggle for power that is American society in 2021.
“If Juneteenth is really about emancipation,” asks Kirk,
why not… September 22, 1862, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation? Or January 1, 1863, when the Proclamation took effect? Or December 18, 1865, with ratification of the 13th Amendment?
Because it’s not about emancipation, which is one of America’s great moral achievements. It’s about creating a summertime, race-based competitor two weeks before July 4th, which should be the most unifying civic holiday on the calendar.
Independence Days or Daze. National Review’s in-house historian, Dan McLaughin, says Juneteenth is a worthy American holiday. However, he acknowledges that the Left is trying to use the commemoration for illicit and nefarious purposes.
For this reason, he urges Congress to “change back the name of the holiday to take out the ‘National Independence Day’ part, which is agitprop.”
We already have an Independence Day, which was celebrated throughout the United States long before 1865. It is also not what the people who actually created the Juneteenth holiday and celebrated it for over a century called it. It is Juneteenth, and Juneteenth is all the name it needs.
That certainly would help, but the larger-scale problem will remain. To wit: the Left is intent on exploiting the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and racism writ large to condemn America as an illegitimate nation that must be “fundamentally transformed” and “reinvented” along Marxian and socialist lines.
Victimhood. That’s why victimhood is central to the Left’s narrative of American history. That’s why ethnic and racial history of official victim groups—blacks, women, Hispanics, Asian Americans, et al.—is the only real history that we publicly celebrate now.
Black History Month, for instance, is widely touted by federal agencies, corporations, and the media, but not Italian-American Heritage and Culture Month. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday is a widely celebrated holiday, but not Columbus Day. Why?
Because blacks are considered victims; Italian Americans are not. King is seen as an avatar against injustice; Columbus is seen as a perpetrator of injustice.
Group Hierarchy. Since the Left’s intent is to highlight America’s sins, real and imagined, blacks and other victims get pride of place in the American story; everyone else has to sit in the back of the bus—assuming, that is, they are lucky enough even to get a seat on the bus.
Juneteenth should be commemorated as an American triumph made possible by our nation’s founding principles and by the Judeo-Christian faith and goodness of the American people. But given that that is not how many Juneteenth advocates see it—to them, the holiday underscores our nation’s irredeemably racist nature—Americans can be forgiven for being lukewarm about the holiday.
Feature photo credit: Penn Today.