Juneteenth

Juneteenth is a portmanteau of June 19, 1865.  This date is supposed to represent something to do with slaves in this country being freed.

The fact is, the Civil War ended in April, 1865, but word didn't travel fast then, and some areas were resistant to freeing slaves anyway.

June 19, 1865, was the date that slaves were supposedly finally freed in the last slave-owning stronghold, which was Texas.

I say supposedly freed, because some slave-owners resisted so much that they killed some of the slaves they owned, rather than allow them to be free, and even more than that, blacks were never treated properly in this country, after April, 1865, June, 1865, or today.  There have been lots and lots of ways of suppressing and disadvantaging them, and all those undermining methods have been employed.

It would be wrong to say the Civil War didn't accomplish anything.  It did, but it was limited, and other abuses were substituted.  Just to take one example, after the Civil War, when the country in general "made the mistake" of allowing blacks to vote, they voted in many other blacks.  So gerrymandering was exaggerated, and voter suppression evolved, so that legislatures were no longer significantly black in some areas, as they temporarily were after the war.  Suppression was rampant, and insidious, and it took many forms.  It could have been public education distortion, college admission quotas, loan access, or any of a number of mechanisms.  And of course -- of course -- police brutality.

As it happens, a few years ago, I made a study of the Constitutional "Second Amendment."  One person who opined about it had reason to think the so-called permission to bear arms which was supposedly granted by the Second Amendment was particularly for the purpose of allowing southern states slave-owners, and bounty-hunters, to own guns, so they could track down and either re-capture or kill run-away slaves.  It's not a long step from that kind of "social contract" to the approach all of us, clearly including legislatures and law enforcement, take to black people.

A century after the Civil War, we had activity that sort of culminated in what we call the "Civil Rights Movement."  That, like the Civil War, accomplished some things.  But there were two problems.  One was that it left way too much room for the same kind of racist mischief that was made after the Civil War.   The other problem -- and I'm taking a massive risk here; I can never run for general office after I leave a "paper trail" like this -- is that it relied in part on celebrating black culture.  "Black [was] beautiful."  The effect of that was that the disadvantages and limitations this country spent centuries imposing on black people became an acceptable, and even emulated, condition.  If some black people needed to feel good about themselves, and unique, by dressing in certain ways, for example, that was a celebrated style, and that's fine.  Unless the evolution of that style eventually included wearing trousers that were too big, and were falling off.  In my opinion, at least, that wasn't fine any more.  But what also got indirectly promoted as characteristic of black people was substandard education, which, as I say, was imposed on black people, and relentless destruction of the family unit.  If no one worked to correct that, then there was a general and societal "dumbing down" of people in general, if people in general, out of lack of personal ambition or out of wish to identify, adopted the characteristics and styles of a group who were impeded by chronic disadvantage.  And that happened, without question.  It has contributed to much greater acceptance of single-parent families, among all groups, and to elevation of styles like "gangsta."

And through all of this, we never stopped imposing disadvantages.  Never.  Today -- and I mean almost literally today -- there is further upheaval about racism reinvigorated by symbolic clowns like Donald Trump.  And that's after Watts, Arthur MacDuffie, and many others.  We simply don't quit.  We continue to be relentless, and we liberally add "blaming the victims."

I have heard or read many black people talk about how difficult it is -- how difficult it's made for them -- to be black.  The way they describe it is that they have to work twice as hard to get half as much.  And those are the lucky ones who don't get gratuitously incarcerated, or assassinated.  Every black parent will talk openly about their concerns, especially for their sons, who appear to be favorite targets.

One of my homepages -- I'm embarrassed to say it's msn.com -- publishes a daily poll.  The polls are moronic -- the questions are stupid, and the answers from which respondents can choose are sometimes like the "are you still beating your wife" joke -- and I long ago stopped answering them.  But I watch them come and go.  The first question on today's poll is "Do you think Juneteenth should be a national holiday."  The possible answers are "yes," "no," and "I don't know."  But the question is -- setting aside that Juneteenth isn't specifically about what people think it's about -- should Juneteenth be a national holiday to celebrate what?  That we finally stopped abusing black people after the Civil War, or after the Civil Rights Movement, or since yesterday?  We didn't.  A holiday called Juneteenth is no more meaningful than MLK's birthday.  It's just another sad day, and another sad reminder, and another day that we might very well violate the spirit of what Juneteenth is theoretically supposed to mean.

It will take an amazing effort to restructure most of American society to address racism.  Elevating Juneteenth to national holiday status?  I myself wouldn't bother.  But maybe black people don't feel that way.  If it would make them feel better to have that designation, it's fine with me.  But it doesn't accomplish anything real.  I've fleetingly wondered about the proposal to pay reparations.  But I can't make sense of it.  There isn't enough money in the world to compensate American black people for the centuries of mistreatment they've received here.  Whatever we could imagine giving them wouldn't be enough.  On the other hand, the token we would cough up would also be too much.  What would we give them?  A hundred million dollars each?  Ten million dollars each?  A million dollars each?  Do you know what happens to lottery winners, or people who make a lot of money playing sports?  Most of them declare bankruptcy.  It's too much money, and the vast majority of people don't know how to handle it.  All we can do is resolve to show proper respect, from one human being to another, and stop beating on them.  Caucasians should treat black people the same way they treat other Caucasian people, or themselves.  And we would have to work harder -- twice as hard, to accomplish half as much -- to correct what we can of the damage that has been done.  The schools don't have to be better.  They have to be the same.  And the students have to have eaten breakfast, at homes where two parents can receive the support and encouragement that everyone else gets, so they can form the happy and stable families everyone else is allowed to form.  Those two parents have to have the same chances to have learned and trained and gotten proper jobs that people who are not black have.  Once all that happens, no one will care about, or remember, Juneteenth.

Happy Juneteenth.