Making Juneteenth a federal holiday is an empty symbol
Abolish the police then we can talk
The first time I learned about Juneteenth was when I was a teenager. I was a teenager when Justin Timberlake was punk’d by Ashton Kutcher. Back then a lot of people didn’t know about Juneteenth or Justin Timberlake being awful. My dad and I walked out of Walmart to find a very friendly Black man grilling hot dogs and hamburgers. He was also selling bright green Juneteenth shirts and before I knew what was on those shirts I wanted one. Yes, I was a material girl living in a material world and I’m not proud of it.
I don’t remember whether there was a sign but I remember asking him what Juneteenth was and when he told me I was shocked. I had just learned about slavery, so this was just another terrible factoid I had learned about my new home. I’m an immigrant and at this point I was collecting terrible facts about the United States of America like I was in some dystopian easter egg hunt and instead of eggs it was bad news. After I pulled my jaw from the ground, I got the shirt because obviously, it was cute and political, two words that describe me. Everytime I wore that shirt people would ask me what it meant, I would tell them, and they would be as shocked as I was the first time I heard it.
That was about two decades ago and a lot has changed, except for Justin Timberlake, he is still awful. A lot more people know about Juneteenth now because it’s a federal holiday. We said abolish the police, they heard give them a federal holiday so Walmart can make money from selling ice cream. No they didn’t hear that, they just were never going to give us anything. Walmart disrespected Juneteenth by trying to commodify it but the United States government disrespected Juneteenth by trying to trick us into thinking we’d gotten something from that one summer that the cops beat our asses. Juneteenth being a national holiday is just another attempt to get us to believe that this is a free country. We weren’t buying that fourth of July shit anymore so they were like, well what about Juneteenth, that’s a real independence day. People are calling Juneteenth independence day and it’s really upsetting because we are not free. Calling it the new indepence day is like calling fruit gushers real fruit.
We are not free on many levels. Slavery was never abolished. Go read the 13th amendment like you read the essay for the SATs if this is the first time you are hearing this. We still live in a racial hierarchy that keeps Black people in poverty and ovepolices our neighborhoods. Segregation is still here. This country is still profiting from Black blood and until this ends we should be celebrating Juneteenth exactly the way that man outside Walmart was celebrating it. He said it was the day that the slaves in Texas freed themselves and that was about it. He didn’t add any theater to it to make it grander than what it was because he was a Black man living in Texas and he knew we are not free.
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Your favorite anarchist comedian,
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