Saturday marks the 156th anniversary of Juneteenth. The celebration recognizes the date when the population of enslaved Americans in Galveston, Texas, received news of their freedom, a full two and a half years after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863. Quite a milestone to commemorate.
In recent years, the day had evolved into an outdoor Black American ritual. Lots of music playlists of empowering hip-hop and R&B classics (with at least one Frankie Beverly and Maze song). “Soul food” dispensed and consumed. Languorous afternoons in the local park. But this year, Juneteenth—even as President Joe Biden is set to sign the bill making it a national holiday—has become yet another victim of cultural appropriation by a white majority still grappling to understand the true meaning of “racial reckoning.” Corporations, small businesses, local governments, and federal agencies have taken to embracing the notion of Juneteenth as a holiday or “wellness day” for their staff, sparing Black employees the trouble of calling in sick.
It is ironic that Juneteenth originated in a state whose current governor, Greg Abbott, just signed legislation—Texas House Bill 3979—banning the teaching of materials tied to the grossly mischaracterized academic field of critical race theory (CRT). Forbidden in Lone Star schools under the state mandate: the Pulitzer Prize–winning series by The New York Times, “The 1619 Project.” Texas’s actions regarding the intersectional teaching of structural racism in the American narrative mirrors those in other red states, fueled by white, right-wing paranoia, and stoked throughout the administration of the 45th president of the United States. (See: Dr. Seuss mania; Who Stole My Christmas?; etc., etc.)
Leading up to this year’s Juneteenth, I thought a lot about those who have chosen to deny America’s ever-thriving legacy of white supremacy. And for a while, I had found it difficult to muster the stamina to sit down and watch director Luke Holland’s recent documentary, Final Account. After two stalled attempts to make it through, though, I finally watched the film in its entirety last week. It captures often revulsive but always fascinating conversations with German women and men who were Nazi soldiers, sympathizers, Hitler Youth, or simply dispassionate bystanders to the rise of the Third Reich, and the unimaginable terror of the Holocaust. Barely clocking in at an hour and a half, Final Account speaks chillingly of the treacherous journey of collective acknowledgment and preservation of historical memory undertaken by Germany in the decades after World War II.
The documentary also stands as a challenge of sorts to one of the most divisive chapters in America’s modern history. The German public—as have many other citizens from countries as disparate as Cambodia and Rwanda—have tried to confront, absorb, acknowledge, and reach some kind of reckoning after gross examples of social depravity and moral failing among their countrymen. But as Jewish American philosopher Susan Neiman notes in her seminal 2019 book, Learning From the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, America has yet to fully reckon with the enduring consequences of being a nation founded on African enslavement—and Indigenous genocide.
Which brings us to the CRT backlash. I find myself shaking my head in disbelief when I see or hear or read about outraged parents and their far-right-leaning allies in the punditry profession express fury that America’s schoolkids are allegedly being accused of harboring hidden racism—as if there were an inherent evil in exposing young learners to critical studies about slavery, white supremacy, or bias. I wonder where those same pundits and parents were when kids of color were made to feel put upon themselves, decade after decade. When textbooks had little or no content elevating the inherent value and contributions of the “Other” Americans to this country’s “greatness.” When slapping the names of Native American caricatures (Redskins, Indians, Braves, and the like) on athletic uniforms—or making whooping sounds, as a sort of battle cry, harkening back to “the Wild West”—was considered an accepted practice. When kids joking on playgrounds in nonsensical gibberish—to mimic “Chinese” dialects—was tolerated.
In a memorable essay, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison wrote about the responsibilities and tensions of being a writer of color. She noted that narrators who were considered “Others” were “raced.” White narrators, in contrast, were presumptively released from representing or being ambassadors for their respective communities. White narrators could simply “transcend.”
For too long, the unencumbered storytellers to whom Morrison was referring were given a pass. And today too many Americans—no matter their racial makeup—remain incapable of facing the realities of our shared history. From a place of fear, denial, or self-delusion, the meaning of what CRT actually is and isn’t eludes many parents, politicians, and educators. Many fail to grasp why it’s more important than ever to decenter whiteness in the shared narrative of a country. Why it’s important to recognize that it isn’t so easy for the marginalized to transcend identities that have strategically been used to vilify and disempower them intergenerationally.
Which is why, this Saturday, there is virtue in recalling the African-descended enslaved people of Galveston from more than 150 years ago. Those of us who choose to ignore or forget our nation’s worst sins remain locked in the past, consigned to the ever present, unable to move forward, imprisoned by too-often-invisible transgressions.
Jimmie Briggs, a Vanity Fair contributor, is a Principal at the Skoll Foundation. The views expressed herein are Jimmie Briggs’s own and written in his personal capacity and should not be attributed to any organization.
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