Everyone loves a four-day work week, or should I say a three-day weekend. What’s not to love about the new and yet very old holiday that is Juneteenth? While it has been celebrated in various locations in the South, mainly Texas and Louisiana, for centuries, it has been a federal holiday since 2021. And while this year was the blickety blackest I’ve seen of the new/old holiday, it is important to note that if school were still in session, many of the students, especially those in Florida and Tennessee, and Missouri and Utah, and TEXAS and so many other states, would not be learning about it.
It’s a wonder we are celebrating Juneteenth at all.
Black people built the same Capitol building where the law was written to make it nationally recognized, but somehow even though slavery was so widespread, including helping to develop the wealth of the North, having a day off as a way to acknowledge the contributions, although unwillingly, of Black people, is somehow a social faux pas.
Yesterday, a mean old white lady named Candace Owens, or as I like to call her, grifting-ass bitch, Candace No-wins, tweeted, “Juneteenth is still ghetto and made up.”
I am not sure how Juneteenth is not only ghetto, other than it is the first federally recognized holiday that primarily celebrates the overcoming of struggles of Black people (Memorial Day was started by Black people centuries ago, but that has been whitewashed enough that people that most people would not know that, let alone the actual war from which the holiday blossomed), and isn’t any more made up than any other holiday. I mean, Thanksgiving is great and all, but it is a holiday that spawned from white people not knowing how to grow their own food and some nice people that they eventually killed, helping them not starve to death, cute. Columbus Day, oh brother, and what the f-ck is Flag Day? What even does that mean? But somehow, the celebration of emancipation is ghetto. Not even the slavery that spawned it. The celebrating of its freedom. Funny she should say that because isn’t the Fourth of July like ghetto, too then? Weren’t people actually still slaves then? Oh wait, we weren’t considered people back then, so it doesn’t really count.
Hmmm, so, like the Boston Tea Party, is that looting and vandalism while pretending to be another race? If ain’t ghetto to them, what in the entire f-ck is?
April 22 is Confederate Memorial Day, a holiday that is still a state holiday in Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina, and is observed in some way in 10 other Southern states, which makes that two more states than were in the actual confederacy. If bigotry ain’t gon’ do nothing, it’s gonna spread. Candace Owens has never tweeted about Confederate Memorial Day being ghetto, let alone mentioning it at all, the same goes for Flag Day because, again, what the f-ck is that holiday even about, besides the obvious? American culture, by default, is white. The holidays we celebrate en masse were all started by white customs, with the exception of Juneteenth, which celebrates the ending of a white custom. I mean, she never said Halloween was ghetto.
A holiday to celebrate freeing people from chattel bondage will never be any more ghetto than those who made their bondage a thing, and it definitely will never more ghetto than the holiday which commemorates those who sought to keep them enslaved, whether they died on a battlefield or not.
Mentalities like that of Owens and other grifters will always see Blackness as ghetto—that is why she is so quick to remove herself from it. It’s funny how a woman with struggle ends and overrelaxed hair does not know ghetto when she looks in the mirror.
Juneteenth isn’t ghetto, slavery is.
