June 16, 2024

Hello, FSTV friends!

With Juneteenth approaching, we're excited to share a special op-ed from our co-executive director, Mark Winston Griffith, reflecting on his connection to this significant day!

OP-ED: My Juneteenth

by MARK WINSTON GRIFFITH

I was in high school the first time I understood the power of national observance.

It was the early ’80s. Stevie Wonder had just released the song “Happy Birthday,” which explicitly campaigned to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a federal holiday—a proposition that Congress was about to consider legislatively, but naïvely, I couldn’t imagine how anyone could possibly oppose it. That was until a white classmate of mine looked me in the eye and argued that Martin Luther King Jr. was a Black hero and icon, and, by definition, not an American one.

I was shaken. I had been born and raised in Black neighborhoods, but this was my first time attending a predominantly white school and I was seduced into craving the acceptance of the white majority around me. With a single verbal swipe, that white classmate didn’t just relegate me to guest status in what he claimed was his world, but casually denied my full humanity as well. Never again, I vowed, would I make myself prone to the affirmation of white people.

Roughly 40 years later, the federal government designated another national holiday aimed at affirming the Black experience in America, and I pause to consider its meaning. 

Juneteenth National Independence Day was signed into law by President Biden in 2021 and commemorates the unofficial end of slavery on June 19,1865. Like MLK Day before it, Juneteenth is a referendum on just how immutably “American” Black folks are in this country. It serves as a prompt for Americans to celebrate the promise of Black liberation, as well as a reminder not to sleep on America’s claims to equalitarian, multi-racial democracy.

Celebrated informally for more than 150 years before Biden enshrined it, Juneteenth marks the moment when emancipation was enforced in the western reaches of the Confederacy, and enslaved Texans learned for the first time they were free—two and half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and two months after Confederate General Robert E. Lee formally surrendered, but months before the 13th amendment was ratified by Congress, constitutionally ending slavery. 

Even then, enslaved people in Delaware and Kentucky were not emancipated until December of 1865 and Native American tribes held Black slaves until 1866.

Some might consider my own connection to Juneteenth, and the Black identity it invokes, as tenuous. My mother and all four of my grandparents were born in Jamaica and Guyana, where slavery ended 30 years earlier than in the U.S. And while I don’t believe I embody the stereotypical elitism that Caribbean people often display toward descendants of U.S. slavery, my kinship with southern culture is limited, and the legacy of slavery doesn’t feel particularly immediate for me.

However, proximity to American slavery is not the same as proximity to Black American consciousness. Caribbean culture and history are inextricably bound up in the American experience, and vice versa. Moreover, I have lived in this country all my life. I was raised on quintessential American formations like New York public schools, hip hop, Hollywood cinema, and American race constructs. Juneteenth is not directly part of my lineage, but I inarguably live a Black American life—and for anyone to say “my people escaped slavery 30 years before yours” is a ridiculous flex. Even those born on the African continent can hardly claim to have escaped the effects of white supremacy.

Race is as much a reductive force as it is a polarizing one. The people who viewed MLK and racial justice as representing anti-American values, and the America First and “anti-woke” movements of today that seek to scrub Black history and white guilt from textbooks and memory, make few distinctions between expressions of Black identity, whether they originate from the U.S. or from Trump’s “shithole” countries. If Black people are not unified politically and ideologically, we are certainly thrown into the same boat by anti-blackness.

In this way, Juneteenth can feel so trivial and so not-up-to the task of acknowledging the debt to Black people accrued through slavery. It is a token, and woefully inadequate, gesture at best, especially when you consider demands for reparations. As it is, Americans give little thought to the history and significance of most national holidays. Whether it’s a time to rest and connect with family and friends, or an opportunity to get paid time-and-a-half, or simply a day of discount shopping, the original significance of national holidays fades the more they are ritualized or churned by capitalism.

Like the act of putting Malcolm X’s face on a postage stamp, celebrating the end of chattel slavery was originally a subtle act of subversion that was itself subverted once it was appropriated by the federal government. But observing Juneteenth is not like celebrating Nat Turner’s rebellion or the Amistad revolt—moments when Black people threw off their own shackles—or even like the Fourth of July, which represents the birth of a nation through armed struggle. When dramatic depictions of slavery, like the television series “Roots” or the movie “Twelve Years a Slave,” were released to critical acclaim, there was always a running commentary that American audiences are way too comfortable with representations of Black people on plantations. Seen cynically, at a time when revisionist historians are insisting the institution of slavery benefited Black people, it’s as if Juneteenth is that time of the year when white people get to say, “Remember, we set you free. You’re welcome.”

On the other hand, Juneteenth is not simply a mid-June day off work, nor was it bestowed upon us by the federal government. It was invented by Black folks, for Black folks, and observed by Black folks across the country throughout three centuries, mostly out of plain view of popular culture. Although Congress, people, and organizations have been lobbying for decades to make it a federal holiday, rank-and-file Black folks have been just fine with celebrating Juneteenth under the radar. Like Malcolm X’s birthday, Kwanzaa, Black Solidarity Day in November, Indigenous People’s Day (which supplants another federal observance, Columbus Day), or the National Day of Mourning that reframes Thanksgiving, there is a robust nationalist tradition in this country, practiced by people of color, that asserts an alternative set of historical narratives and values.

The Black American experience is nothing if not a state of contradiction, a poetic place where oppression, pain, and dehumanization meet unrivaled success, brilliance, and even patriotism. While this country was in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic and social justice protests were inspired by the death of George Floyd, Biden used the memorialization of Juneteenth as a nod to the Black electoral base that, once again, changed the course of history by putting him in office. 

Of course, not unlike the backlash that followed the so-called Radical Reconstruction after the Civil War, polling shows that public opinion has since soured on the 2020 uprisings and demands for racial justice, while the American judiciary methodically goes about dismantling civil rights.

But Juneteenth had already resonated profoundly with a new generation of unapologetically Black activists who celebrate it in ways I never saw people react to Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, or any other holiday, for that matter. 

As the director of a Black community organizing group, I watched Black abolitionists, anti-capitalists, and self-proclaimed radicals alike claim Junetheenth as their own. While organizations and politicians routinely spend MLK Day lining up speeches and ceremonies, it’s more common to party and come together as Black family and community on Juneteenth. Sure, MLK Day points to a vision of American progress, but Juneteenth more keenly evokes Black transcendence and Afrofuturism.

It’s easy to turn a jaundiced eye toward national holidays, especially one that recalls a moment in which enslaved Texans had to be told that they were already free. I will choose to see Juneteenth not as something that the American government or anyone else has the ability to recognize and give us, but, in the spirit of self-determination, as a grace and freedom that we Black people, from every part of the world, can always grant ourselves.

Reprinted with the permission of the Amsterdam News

The New York Amsterdam News started over a century ago and is one of the most influential Black-owned newspapers. Founded on Dec. 4, 1909, by James H. Anderson, it began with six sheets of paper and sold for two cents from his home. As the Black population moved to big cities, the paper's success grew, relocating multiple times before settling at its current Harlem address and remains a crucial voice for Black and diverse communities in New York and beyond.