Look What They've Done To Juneteenth, Ma

The Juneteenth Flag, designed by Ben Haith and Lisa Jeanne Graf, per the Boston Globe

This week’s completed legislation to make Juneteenth a federal holiday leaves me with distinctly mixed feelings. I appreciate the desire to federally recognize the day Black Americans in Galveston, Texas, received word of the Emancipation Proclamation. It not only recognizes those formerly enslaved Americans’ liberation, it also recognizes liberation didn’t come all at once. Word needed to travel, and in some American regions, still needs to travel.

However, I feel squeamish about giving the event official calendar recognition. Consider other federal holidays. Labor day recognizes America’s labor movement, while we retain laws making labor organizing difficult, and limiting collective bargaining. We have Martin Luther King, Jr., day, which has basically become another scheduled day off school. We officially recognize what these days mean, but practically, they’ve become intellectual clutter.

In creating another holiday, the state does largely what the church does by making somebody a saint: it incorporates them into the structure. Their uniqueness gets subsumed, they stop challenging the status quo, and the system chooses which aspects get celebrated. Distinct qualities disappear, especially if those qualities are impolitic, because the individual or event becomes part of the superstructure. Dr. King or Samuel Gompers get reduced to bromides.

Most important, though, the institution gets to clothe itself in somebody else’s virtue. In retelling the narrative of Galveston’s liberation, the state innately implies: we did this. State power brought liberation to Galveston’s enslaved population. This narrative will, almost inevitably, minimize both Galveston’s slavemasters, who concealed the Emancipation Proclamation for over two years, and Galveston’s enslaved workers, and the resistance they offered to the Peculiar Institution.

The state’s hagiography, represented in national holidays, creates a particular narrative. July 4th, for instance, becomes about “We Hold These Truths,” while omitting, say, the “Merciless Indian Savages.” MLK Day becomes about triumphs accomplished, not justice delayed, and certainly not about any backsliding we’ve suffered since then. Based on history, I fear Juneteenth will become about White liberators, not Black resistance.

Juneteenth certainly happened, don’t mistake me. Major General Gordon Granger’s troops definitely occupied Galveston on June 19th, 1866. But by creating a holiday, with the accompanying justificatory narrative, that becomes the most important fact: the act of state. The Great White Father signing General Order Number 3 trumps the suffering imposed by powerful people, or the acts of resistance, great or small, performed by the masses.

A Juneteenth celebration at the Lincoln Memorial in 2020, per ABC News

In decreeing the celebration, the state clothes itself in vestments of virtue, and claims: we brought your freedom. The state claims itself an air of goodness which, in practice, it still lacks. It takes credit for motivating history, although at present, it continues minimizing attempts to remedy the broken system. It purports that the state relieves the oppressed, and therefore, whatever the state does—or wants to do—must perforce be good.

When citizens press the state to actually provide material benefits, that becomes a problem. When asked to lift the poor from poverty, especially generational or racialized poverty, the state pleads poverty and claims there’s nothing it can do. But it performs signs that involve no actual commitment, like decreeing a holiday, because that grants the outward appearance of virtue. Like a teenager cosplaying Captain America, the state looks heroic, but does nothing.

Far worse, I think, than the inevitable descent into barbecues and chain-store sales, this process represents how creating holidays damages the core. Federal holidays have turned Dr. King, the labor movement, and Jesus Christ become stand-ins for the establishment, their orphaned quotes reduced to slogans for the status quo, as historian Kevin M. Kruse writes. Holidays make dissidents into federal employees.

Consequently, today’s powerful people get to feel virtuous. They feel like they’ve contributed something to the discourse. What they’ve contributed doesn’t actually improve anything, or make anyone’s situation better, certainly, but that doesn’t much matter. They feel good, reassured that they aren’t historic villains for holding power. They clothe themselves in virtuous robes, while exempting themselves from the difficult work of making change.

But individuals aren’t pressed down by holidays, they’re held down by power. Granting federal imprimatur to Juneteenth, without helping the generational victims of redlining (for instance), does nothing about the problems which exist. Holidays are, frankly, easy, and cost little. Remedying the problems which our government, economy, and history have created, requires will and money, resources the state notoriously loathes to spend.<

A Juneteenth holiday at least officially provides recognition to slavery and its legacy, long overdue. But it doesn’t fix the problem, and provides justification to keep deferring any remedy.