Against Juneteenth
The fourth annual observance of Juneteenth National Independence Day passed with less fanfare than the first, but the usual cast of politicians and journalists still made a point of paying obeisance to the latest high holy day in the new liturgical calendar. A headline in the Hill trumpeted: “Black advocates to use Juneteenth to demand political change.” President Joe Biden noted the day’s significance as a “mark of the end of our original sin, slavery.” Nancy Pelosi commemorated the holiday as “a reminder of the racism and cruelty that stains our history.” In a video address, Sen. Raphael Warnock took the opportunity to solemnly remind Americans of “how far we’ve come, and” — of course — “how much further we still need to go.”
The newest federal holiday presents America with yet another “opportunity,” as CBS put it, “to remember the country’s foundation on centuries of slavery.” Few members of our political elite seem to see any problem with, or objection to, this exercise. When Juneteenth first became a federal holiday in 2021 — one of only 11 such rituals on the federal calendar — just 14 House Republicans voted against it. The Senate passed the bill unanimously. (In fact, the bill was originally introduced in the Senate by a Republican, John Cornyn of Texas.)
If an outside observer bore witness to all this, the near-unified congressional effort to instantiate Juneteenth might strike them as bizarre. The holiday’s formal, exoteric meaning is a commemoration of the end of slavery, marking “the day slaves in Texas found out that they were freed by President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.” Until recently, however, it was a largely obscure and informal regional holiday, celebrated only in Texas and a handful of other states. As Jeremy Carl noted today, Joe Biden himself “never tweeted about Juneteenth in his decades as a Senator or VP until 2019 — when he was already running for President.” In fact, “on the eve of Juneteenth being declared a national holiday in 2021, 60% of Americans confessed to the respected pollster Gallup that they knew ‘little to nothing’ about it.”
None of that has stopped many conservatives from immediately embracing the new tradition, even arguing that the Right should make it our own. “Conservatives, Don’t Be Afraid To Embrace Juneteenth,” blared a Newsweek op-ed last year. (In lieu of left-wing racialism, the author “urge[d] conservatives” to “reconsider the ways that the celebration of Juneteenth aligns with the values of localism, cultural and spiritual rootedness, and the dignity of life and the family.”) “Embracing Juneteenth isn’t about rewriting the American founding or about replacing Independence Day,” Dace Potas assured readers in a USA Today essay two days prior. “It is about embracing the realization of our founding promises for all people.” In 2021 — the year Juneteenth was formally codified — the Heritage Foundation’s president at the time, Kay C. James, confidently declared that Juneteenth was the “perfect answer” to critical race theory.
The most terrifying thing about all of this is that some of these people might actually believe it. One could only ever think that Juneteenth was a “celebration of our founding principles” — or even a “commemoration of the end of slavery” — if they had been in a coma for the past decade. (Which, to be fair, isn’t beyond the reach of doubt, given the belligerent inability of some conservatives to understand where we are, how we got here, and the concrete nature of what is happening to our country.) Otherwise, the only rational explanation is that it is sheer happenstance that Juneteenth happened to coincide with the 1619 Project (which aimed to make the year that the first black slaves arrived in America “our true founding”), and Black Lives Matter (a months-long orgy of iconoclastic racial revolution), and the rise of critical race theory and DEI (which rewrites all of American history through the singular lens of the white oppressors and the nonwhite oppressed), and the vaunted national “racial reckoning” (which tore down statues, wiped the names of American heroes off of our monuments and buildings, and institutionalized the regime of perpetual self-flagellation that gave rise to Juneteenth in the first place).
In other words, a “conservative” could only ever support Juneteenth if they were to ignore the social, cultural, and political context in which it first appeared as a federal holiday. But we live in a context-dependent world, comprised of causes and effects. (This is what the British political theorist Michael Oakeshott meant when he described politics as the “activity of attending to the general arrangements of a set of people whom chance or choice have brought together” — “the pursuit, not of a dream, or of a general principle, but of an intimation.”) One of the few brave Republicans who voted against Juneteenth, Rep. Matt Rosendale of Montana, made this precise point at the time: “In theory, there is nothing wrong with a celebration of emancipation,” Rosendale wrote. “But we don’t live in theory. Our politics happen in practice, and in practice, the vote that elevated Juneteenth National Independence Day to the status of a federal holiday is a disaster for those who hold that our country is good.” He continued:
Juneteenth will become the high holy day of the Left’s calendar, a Lenten repentance to Pride Month’s Easter celebration. It will serve as a day to recollect all of the gravest of America’s sins. There will be educational programs about the brutality of slavery, with no mention of the national agony of the Civil War or how the nation has struggled mightily to live up to its founding creed. There will be specials on the Tulsa race riot, the Birmingham church bombings. There will be retrospectives on the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin.
The Left will put forward these things not because they are evil but because leftists’ current political project relies on the creation of a historical memory in which America’s story is one long racist nightmare. No one is going to defund their police unless the police are tools of white supremacy. No one will radically overturn voting laws unless every ballot security measure is Jim Crow. No one will pay reparations unless the black experience in America today is as bad as it was during 1860.
The purpose of Juneteenth was abundantly clear from the outset, to anyone who cared enough to actually listen to the words of its fiercest advocates. After signing the holiday into law, Biden declared it to be “a day in which we remember the moral stain and terrible toll of slavery on our country — what I’ve long called America’s original sin. A long legacy of systemic racism, inequality, and inhumanity.” In spite of the Right’s pitiable attempts to present a viable counternarrative, practically every commemoration of the holiday in the nation’s official institutions has made more or less the same point since then. “As the Black Lives Matter movement gained renewed power across the country and abroad the previous year with the police killings of Black Americans like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, public calls grew louder for the federal government to acknowledge emancipation as the critical turning point it was in U.S. history,” today’s CBS piece reported. “Advocates sought, again, for leaders to codify the Juneteenth holiday into law, decades after communities began to push for broader recognition of Juneteenth as an emblem of unity, power and resilience in the wake of the police beating of Rodney King in 1991.”
The “solidification” of Juneteenth National Independence Day “was the first time a national holiday was established in the U.S. since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was set to honor the late civil rights leader’s birthday in 1983,” the outlet beamed.
Just so. What has come to be known as “MLK Day,” too, is part and parcel of the mythology of the New America, which vies to destroy and replace the myths, heroes, and traditions of the old republic. New ideological fads and doctrines such as critical race theory are not at odds with the ethos of MLK Day and Juneteenth, as many conservatives are wont to argue; they are the natural, indeed intended, result of it. As David Azerrad noted last year:
Even if it were possible to somehow retrofit MLK into some sort of a conservative by very selectively citing him, such a sanitized King would not actually be helpful in the fight against wokeness. To recognize King’s moral authority is to accept that the fight against white racism remains the most pressing issue of our time. It is to accept the transvaluation of values, effected by the Civil Rights Movement, which has made racism the one unforgivable sin and its eradication the new categorical imperative. It is to strengthen the reigning understanding of politics as a process by which (purportedly) oppressed groups protest to get their (special) rights. Lastly, it is to allow the past injustices committed against blacks to loom larger in the collective historical imagination than any of the country’s glorious accomplishments. All this plays into the hands of the [CRT ideologues], and the woke left more generally, by confirming the essentials of their worldview.
The official name of our latest federal holiday — Juneteenth National Independence Day — gives the game away. In the same way as the 1619 Project seeks to replace 1776, as “Indigenous People’s Day” seeks to replace Columbus Day, as “Pride Month” seeks to replace the symbols and traditions of the old Christian public morality, and as the “black national anthem” seeks to replace the Star-Spangled Banner, Juneteenth seeks to replace July 4, substituting the story of black slavery and oppression for that of the Revolutionary War and the patriots of ’76. Conservatives who believe they can absolve left-wing causes of their leftism by celebrating them for different, better reasons should heed the words of Burke: “I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to any thing which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object as it stands stripped of every relation… The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.”
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