Juneteenth Finally Understood by One Lone White Man
Freedom Read is Freedom Declared
Previously I was a bit caught off guard by the ‘sudden’ implementation of this Juneteenth holiday that gave me the day off. But on some reflection this year when the day approached, and I faced yet again the prospect of time off, I realized I could be grateful to black Americans for this holiday. While falling far short of reparations, we now have two official federal holidays celebrating and celebrated by black Americans (MLK Day).
A holiday to celebrate black American freedom represents an opportunity for joy rarely given by the US government.
I also pictured in my mind an American Union general having to gather up black Americans and read to them this declaration that they are free. The federal government had to read to the poor and downtrodden, the beaten and enslaved, that they were free, and finally admitted defeat. When had that ever happened before?
The deep inalienable rights promised at the nation’s outset in its Declaration of Independence that was conceived as colorless and genderless, a necessary pre-condition for democracy to exist, was essentially read to them for the first time. The US government hadn’t bothered to read it before black slaves, to let them interpret it for themselves. They hadn’t stopped and read the Constitution to black Americans before letting them know a nation had been established that granted rights and liberty to all, to read to black Americans the Bill of Rights. The “originalist” founders apparently didn’t want to.
And I like the fact that a military officer read it, as the military is “civilian” and not political, not answering to one man but the people, even if sometimes we feel that it is not the case. This oral reading shows the reverse of what normally happens: the military admits defeat to the poor and enslaved, showing the fundamental human morality at the heart of democracy had finally beaten the military machine of autocracy that had been grinding over the earth for thousands of years.
OK, I know, maybe that last part is a bit too “romantic,” but the symbolism of a general reading black Americans their American rights of democracy shouldn’t be overlooked, no matter how imperfectly it had been done. No politician from any “side” had ever done so before, nor would do so after. Those “slaves” now made free were witnessing something truly historic.
The military, being civilian, represented “both sides”, meaning back then both white sides, the whole of the government. Whether one side liked it or not. And I believe it may had been one of the last times the forces of liberalism in America defeated the autocratic evil conservative tendencies represented ‘best’ by its repression of black Americans, its own citizens.
The autocratic side, the angry white defeated confederates, quickly reasserted themselves in Texas, writing a new bill of labor repression and monetary punishment, the Black Codes of the State of Texas, in 1866. Texas returned to denying the victory of democracy and inalienable rights just given, a bill that formerly enumerated all the daily nitpicking ways to repress those inherent rights. The writers of that 1866 bill are not Americans, not really, and their despicable legacy lives on today — denying, denying, denying the poor and minorities their rights — showing us that indeed Denying is a platform, an ideal. Not a good one, a one-trick pony, not the positive platform a party that truly believes in democracy would ever implement, but at least we know where they stand, at the heart of an insidious evil.
So, yes, I’ll take this holiday to celebrate the recognition of whites bowing to black Americans enslaved by the brutal forces of despotic militaristic tendencies and finally explicitly admitting to these just-enslaved Americans that the values of the free and brave also belong to them. The white Americans did not make this explicit admission formally before, and they haven’t done it since that I can recall.
At least we who deeply believe in democracy and struggle for it, and not away from it, have this holiday of rich symbolism, based on a very real event, that the powerful, as represented by the military general “of the people,” are defeated, a tacit defeat shown where they are recognizing the moral core of the shared humanity of its citizens in the “lowest” of the people, an open recognition of complete equality. Let’s just take this admission of American “white” defeat, of autocracy bending to the acknowledgement of democracy inherent in each individual.
It’s not a perfect admittance, but it may be the only one we get.
