Why Do White People Keep Centering Themselves in Juneteenth Celebration?
Some struggle to accept a day honoring Black liberation
Juneteenth is a holiday celebrating Black Americans’ freedom. However, there are some White people who must have missed the memo because they’ve opted to center themselves rather than taking a moment to honor enslaved people and their descendants. For instance, in Greenville, South Carolina, a Juneteenth flier advertising a local celebration featured two White models, a man and a woman, with the tagline, “an upstate celebration of freedom, love, and unity,” a move that many Black people slammed as inappropriate. When pressed about why the Juneteenth Mega Fest organizers depicted two White people in their advertisement, “Rueben Hays, the organizer of this year’s event and founder and CEO of Juneteenth GVL Mega Fest,” said, “‘We did not want to make this exclusively Black.” The problem is organizers failed to include any Black models; this isn’t an illustration of diversity, it’s erasure.
A Juneteenth flier featuring only White people is a far cry from inclusivity. Furthermore, anyone who understands Black American history would understand just how inappropriate it is to center White people in a Juneteenth celebration. Slavery was a brutal form of race-based human trafficking that deprived Black Americans of their rights, freedom, and humanity for hundreds of years. When historian Michael Tadman described conditions on sugar plantations in Louisiana, he explained that “Deaths greatly exceed[ed] births.” Likewise, Khalil Gibran Muhammad wrote in The 1619 Project that “life expectancy was lower than on a cotton plantation and closer to a Jamaican cane field, where the most overworked and abused could drop dead after seven years of labor.” To add salt to Black Americans’ wounds, chattel slavery, despite the brutality involved, was completely legal, a painful reminder of our duty to challenge unjust laws.
Yet, those Black people freed on Juneteenth in Galveston Bay, Texas, on June 19, 1865, were illegally kept in bondage. The White people in Galveston were cruelly determined to maintain slavery. Even after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863, and their Confederate soldiers lost the Civil War in April of 1865, White Galvestonians had to be forced by military proclamation to respect Black Americans’ freedom. Union General Gordan Granger, along with 2,000 of his troops, traveled to Galveston and issued General Order №3: “This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them, become that between employer and hired labor.” So to be clear, Juneteenth is not a story of unity as the South Carolina flier implied, it’s a story of Black people fighting for their freedom and the White people reluctant to deliver it promptly. Celebrating Juneteenth is about honoring those forced to endure slavery and the persistence of those who fought against domestic tyranny.
Juneteenth is a holiday celebrating Black Americans’ freedom.
Since Juneteenth only recently became a federally recognized holiday, and public schools do not typically teach students about the lived experiences of enslaved people or the events surrounding their enslavement and pursuit of freedom, let alone the first Juneteenth, some may be reasonably confused about the purpose of the holiday, the meaning it holds for Black Americans, many of whom are descendants of enslaved people. However, the White people who actively snubbed Black Americans during the Juneteenth holiday last year, leaving a racist message like “Juneteenth ~ it’s whatever. Enjoy your fried chicken and collard greens,” as employees did at an insurance agency in Millinocket, Maine, know precisely what they’re doing.
While some White people are attempting to center themselves, others are trying to whitewash the holiday as they’ve done to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and others are trying to turn a profit. Last year, we saw how companies like Walmart commodified the Juneteenth holiday using “liberation-themed red velvet ice cream and napkins that read ‘It’s the freedom for me.” For centuries, White people routinely sold Black people, separating mothers and fathers from sons and daughters, husbands from their wives, completely disregarding their humanity to turn a profit, so yes, it’s culturally insensitive for any company to capitalize on a holiday designed to honor newly freed Black Americans. As Matthew Desmond wrote in the New York Times 1619 Project, “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.” During the chattel slavery system, “Cotton grown and picked by enslaved workers was the nation’s most valuable export,” and New Orleans, Louisiana, had a “denser concentration of banking capital than New York City,” something many Americans fail to realize.
Anyone can celebrate Juneteenth and honor the hard-fought freedom of Black Americans. White people, particularly abolitionists like John Brown, who fought to destroy the chattel slavery system, and anti-racists in the modern era, would certainly appreciate the holiday. However, some White people want to bury the legacy of slavery or, worse, portray it as something positive. Two states, Mississippi and Alabama, honor Confederate General Robert E. Lee and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the same day, even though “King gave his life to the cause of racial equality; Lee fought in the Civil War to keep Black people enslaved,” as Meena Venkataramanan pointed out in the Washington Post. America has failed, so far, to address the painful history of slavery and engage in restorative justice, and as a result, we still have slavery defenders exalted as heroes throughout the country.
Centering White people in a Juneteenth celebration is beyond tactless; it’s disrespectful. Also, seeing a whites-only flier is a surefire way to keep Black people away from the event rather than draw them there. Didn’t Hays, the Black organizer, ever hear the southern expression, “you catch more flies with honey than sour milk?” White people were never enslaved in America; Black and Indigenous people were. So, “no,” Black people do not have to include White people in their Juneteenth celebration, particularly when the majority of White Americans oppose restorative justice for slavery, and we certainly shouldn’t center White people or their feelings in Black Americans’ celebration of their freedom. Juneteenth is an opportunity to learn about Black history and how the legacy of slavery continues to impact the lives of Black Americans, but in no shape or fashion should they think of Juneteenth as an opportunity to profit off the suffering of enslaved people, or to center themselves, because doing so disrespects Black Americans, the descendants of slavery.
The Statue of Liberty is the Embodiment of Juneteenth
Did You Think It Was Created to Honor Immigrants?medium.com
Juneteenth Made Black People Free — But Not Equal
America has never reconciled racial inequitiesaninjusticemag.com
Author’s Note: My second-great-grandfather, a Black man named Nathaniel W. Lawson, fought in the First Cavalry Corps for the Union Army, becoming one of the roughly 79,000 Black men who fought for freedom against the Confederate Army.
Originally published on Medium in 2023
💯...sincerely a White Libertarian with a mixed-race family...Juneteenth celebration for White people should only involve reading about history, specifically slavery and anti-Black policy in the US!!!
Happy Juneteenth.