"JUNETEENTH AND THE MEANING OF AMERICA"

 “JUNETEENTH AND THE MEANING OF AMERICA”

Juneteenth begins a two week period in our history when we can now consider two powerful forces in America:  the idea of equality, and the idea of slavery/white supremacy.  These two ideas are not compatible with one another, but they continue to co-exist in the history of the USA.  The tradition is that Frederick Douglass never spoke about equality and justice on July 4, because he saw July 4 celebrations as a mockery as long as people were enslaved in America.  In his famous and powerful speech about Independence Day in 1852 in Rochester, he said these words:  “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer:  a day that reveals to {him}, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which {he} is the constant victim.”

Douglass finds the essence of the struggle in the tension between the idea of equality and the idea of slavery/white supremacy.  How can we celebrate the idea of equality while still holding onto the idea of white supremacy?  Douglass and others knew well how those of us classified as “white”  do it:  we deepen and refine the idea of race and racism.  How could we believe in equality and still hold people in enslavement?  We developed the idea of “white supremacy,” the idea that people of color, and especially those classified as “Black,” were not full human beings in the same way that those classified as “white” were.  The idea of equality, then, does not apply to those classified as “non-white.”  Jefferson and most of the other “founding” fathers did not believe that those classified as “Black” and “Native Americans” were equal human beings.  It was this belief that led them to hold human beings as slaves and to kill and remove Indigenous people from their lands.

After the Civil War, this idea was revived and deepened even further in order to repudiate the outcome of the Civil War (and to deny the value of the 700,000+ lives lost in that War) and in order to re-establish “slavery by another name,” to use Doug Blackmon’s powerful phrase.  This idea of white supremacy retains its power today, as we have seen in the rise of the Party of Trump, dedicated to the idea that white males should be in charge of everything, not because we are greedy and insecure, but because God and nature made us that way.  Those of us classified as “white” are watching the demographics, and we are aware that the time of plurality is not far away in the future, the time when there will be no majority racial classification in USA.  We are willing to support a despot like Trump because he is telling us what we want to hear:  those classified as “white” should always be in charge, especially white males.  This fear of the demographics is driving the Big Lie of the stolen 2020 election, voter suppression acts, censorship on “critical race theory,” anti-immigrant work, and the soon-to-be evisceration of Roe v. Wade.

We have had several tipping points in our history in this struggle between equality and white supremacy.  We saw it in the rise of the abolitionist movement in the 1840’s, in the tumultuous decade of the 1850’s that led to the Civil War.  We saw it in Reconstruction when the idea of equality seemed to be gaining strength.  We saw it in the development of the counter-revolution which pushed the Big Lie of the “Lost Cause,” an idea that pummeled the idea of equality.  We saw it in the 1890’s, when political power combined with violence to re-establish the priority of white supremacy.  We saw it in the 1940’s and 1950’s, when Black veterans returning from World War II were determined not to go back to neo-slavery.  We saw it in the 1960’s, as equality once again gained strength, and slavery was finally ended in 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

Juneteenth acts as a counterpoint to the strong tendency towards white supremacy in our history.  It reminds us all of the power of the idea of equality, an idea that is rooted in struggle.  Even so with Juneteenth, now a federal holiday that reminds us that it took over two years for the news of freedom to reach those held in slavery in Texas.  

Since the Supreme Court hollowed out that Voting Rights Act in in its Shelby v. Holder decision in 2013, we are once again back in that same struggle between equality and white supremacy.  The idea of equality is powerful - many different groups - who were intended to be subservient by the system of race developed in USA – have heard and believed that the idea of equality applied to them also.  We are now at that tipping point again in the struggle between equality and white supremacy.  As we celebrate both Juneteenth and July 4, let us remember the tension between them.  Indeed, in the years to come, let us set aside the two weeks between these two national holidays to be in dialogue on the struggle between these two powerful ideas in American history.  May the profound vision of equality – a vision so frightening that its very authors immediately repudiated it in American history – may this vision go to our own core as individuals and as a nation, and may we live out its creed for all of us.