Juneteenth is now a national holiday. Juneteenth celebrates the end of slavery in the United States; it marks, specifically, the anniversary date of the June 19, 1865, announcement of General Order No. 3 by Union Army general Gordon Granger, proclaiming freedom for slaves in Texas.
The ease to which our national legislature created this new holiday seems really weird given that there is simultaneously a hyper-aggressive movement among Republicans to make it illegal to teach the full story of US history (see “critical race theory“). I can’t know what’s going on in their heads, but I have a few ideas.
Republicans think of Juneteenth as a gift from white people.
While normal people would see the end of enslavement as only the beginning of a very long process of making things right, Republicans see it as a glorious gift that white people gave to Black people — a gift that not only erases all of the evils of enslavement, but that makes white people somehow noble. In truth, ending slavery was literally the least white people could do and the behavior of white people since then dramatically tarnished the meaning of that act.
Republicans think that Republicans ended slavery.
Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, and he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and so clearly Republicans ended slavery, right? No, not at all. First off, the two political parties were much like they are today, with one side overtly evil and the other side more worried about playing nice with evil than about doing the right thing. The abolitionists — the people we’d call dangerous leftists today — were disgusted with both sides, which is why abolitionists like John Brown took matters into their own hands and forced the beginning of the Civil War. It was only after the war was in full swing that the Republicans (under the leadership of Lincoln) decided it was a good idea to end slavery. Despite the fact that John Brown was executed before the war began, the shape of the conflict and its effect on slavery was precisely what he had intended.
Next, we have to consider the fact that today’s Republican party is not the same as the Republican party of 1865. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, the Republican party developed the Southern Strategy, which was to appeal to southern white racists in order to compete more effectively in electoral politics. They did this by using “dog whistles” — phrases that are overtly racist when a racist hears them, but vague or meaningless when a non-racist hears them. In essence, the Democratic Party and Republican Party completely switched places on the subject of racism during this time. At the time when slavery was ended (1865), the Republicans were the liberals, and the Democrats were the conservatives. From the lens of today’s politics, Lincoln was a Democrat. Calling the Republican party “the party of Lincoln” is intentionally deceptive, and everyone who calls it that knows exactly what they are doing.
Third, any time we give an institution credit for something we hide the fact that it is individuals that make change. An institution is just an amalgamation of individuals. All of the individuals who chose to end slavery are long dead; no one alive today deserves the credit for it, even if they happen to belong to an institution that shares the name. It’s like the Ship of Theseus problem, but the new ship is racist.
Creating a national holiday doesn’t change anything.
Republican politicians like the idea of creating a holiday because it doesn’t change anything.
It is the material conditions under which people live that really matter, and creating a holiday does absolutely nothing in that regard. Performative gestures like this are the preferred method of dealing with problems for neoliberalism, because keeping material conditions the way they are is one of the most central goals of neoliberalism. Actual reparations for the evils of slavery would be extremely disruptive. Moreover, thanks to systematic racism, white people are more likely than Black people to occupy the kinds of jobs that will actually have Juneteenth as a paid holiday; if you aren’t off work and being paid to be off work, it really isn’t a holiday for you.
It’s still a nice gesture, and I appreciate it in that regard, but we have to keep our perspective on the true significance of that gesture.
Congress created this holiday out of fear.
Ever since the first slaver looked around and realized that he was outnumbered by his victims, racists have been terrified. Today, conservatives have a deep-seated fear that “urban people” will pour out into the predominantly white suburbs and murder everyone they see, which made the demonstrations during the Trump era particularly panic-inducing for them. Conservatives are right now huddled in their McMansions clutching their AR-15’s, convinced that at any moment, BLM or Antifa supersoldiers are going to show up at their door. The creation of the Juneteenth holiday is an attempt to pacify these supposedly-ultra-violent mobs. Importantly, a majority of Democratic party politicians are conservatives who share this fear — that’s part of why the Democratic party is (as a whole) so resistant to creating positive change.
Conclusion
Republicans were happy to create a national holiday as a gift from white people to Black people that celebrates Republicans having ended slavery, because it doesn’t change anything and might pacify the violent mob of the left. For the next 100 years, Republicans will defend their racism by saying, “Look, we all supported the creation of Juneteenth as a national holiday!”
Related: 14 House Republicans Voted Against Making Juneteenth A Federal Holiday