Juneteenth in Photos
texashighways.com
texashighways.com
Idk why so many people are upset or arguing. Sorry to add to the noise but I’m a naturalized citizen here and I feel like USA has so much history of doing better and moving things forward for everyone.
People all operate independently in thought here, but somehow since 1776 they have genuinely pushed society forward all things considered.
Everyone acting out of self interest but in a direction where things get better, objectively speaking, makes it a good society.
It is superior to living under dictatorships, corruption rotted “democracies”, or religious intolerance where the people always lose.
Fascinating story.. you know it happened but it's weird to read it and imagine it was absolutely real.
From the article:
"The day was dubbed Emancipation Day but, slowly, the term Juneteenth — a portmanteau of June and 19th — took hold."
Debating the name instead of appreciating the holiday and gravity of the topic is missing the forrest for the trees. Just wow.
As far as I know most people consider Emancipation Day the day that the Emancipation Proclamation was signed into law in 1863, whereas Juneteenth marks the day 2.5 years later that the last known enslaved people were freed from the people who decided to just not tell them about the law.
General Order No. 3 - June 19, 1865
Thirteenth Amendment - December 6, 1865
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Order_No._3#Misconcept...
Text:
A common misconception holds that the Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves in the United States, or that the General Order No. 3 on June 19, 1865, marked the end of slavery in the United States. In fact, the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified and proclaimed in December 1865, was the article that made slavery illegal in the United States nationwide, not the Emancipation Proclamation.[6][7][8][9]
Another common misconception is that it took over two years for news of the Emancipation Proclamation to reach Texas, and that slaves did not know they had already been freed by it. In fact, news of the Proclamation had reached Texas long before 1865, and many slaves knew about Lincoln's order emancipating them, but they had not been freed since the Union army had yet to reach Texas to enforce the Proclamation. Only after the arrival of the Union army and General Order No. 3 was the Proclamation widely enforced in Texas.
Regardless, people have been calling it Juneteenth for over a hundred years, it was made a national holiday as Juneteenth, I'm gonna keep calling it that.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
You may be surprised to learn that, coincidentally, America has more people in prison than anywhere else.
It may have encouraged some slaves in the Confederacy to flee, if they found out about it.
Kind of makes sense to me.
source: been there, done that
Some do, some don't. "Black Americans in Coastal California" aren't a homogenous group, and this varies a lot by things like family geographic history, socioeconomic status, and a variety of other factors.
Source: Also been there, also done that.
Do you mean that you're slave descended black americans, and, in the case of HN User mistrial9, therefore speak for most of the slave descended black americans in coastal California?
Or do you guys mean that you celebrate Juneteenth. Thus, "been there, done that"?
The former I would challenge you on, despite obviously not being "black american coastal Californian?". The latter I would never challenge you on as that's your business.
Black AF takes place in California and the main character had a huge celebration with his entire extended family before it was even a federal holiday.
Did you just use the fact that Black characters in fictional media set in California celebrated the holiday to contradict an argument that actual Black people in coastal California do not?
I mean, the claim was factually wrong, but that's the worst counterargument imaginable.
Two middle aged, very poor African-Americans walking down the street in daylight, the woman with a shopping cart and the man with clean but ordinary clothes. I say in a loud voice from many feet away "Is today a holiday of come kind?" The guy replies facing me "the Post Office is closed, I dont know" .. I said "something is on" .. "yeah" .. I get creative .. "but you have been to Texas right?" and he says in a stage whisper with his hand next to his mouth like he is shielding the statement "its Juneteenth" .. I said "nobody cares about that here, right?" He replies "its a DAY, just a day. that's all it is". This is consistent with what I was referring to.. this man did not want to talk about this, or say the name.
After congratulating myself silently because you know "someone was wrong on the Internet" .. I walked a a few blocks and I saw an upright, clean cut African-American man walking, dressed in a way that suggested he was a Church member or off-duty uniform services, also very middle-aged. This man had a clean white t-shirt with an elaborate, dare I say "European logo style" t-shirt that said Juneteenth in some formal typeset way. So I bother to write this long and too-personal reply because "someone on the Internet was wrong" ;-)
no it is not factually wrong, because populations are a demographic system, not a single number. Arguing over "wrong on the Internet" is a waste of brain cells, and you claim my lived experience is "wrong" .. all the worst of online discourse.
Nope, just the last in the Confederate States; the last Union chattel slaves (e.g., in Delaware) were freed by operation of law a few months later with the ratification of the 13th Amendment.
(And that's not even discussing penal slavery allowed under the 13th Amendment.)
To expand on this, knowingbetter did an in-depth video on this topic[0]. The salient bit is that penal slavery was ended in 1941-1942 by Roosevelt, so that the Japanese couldn't use it as war propaganda against the US.
No, convict leasing, one of several manifestations of penal slavery, was (formally) ended by Roosevelt then. Penal slavery continues in the US today, although some states have abolished it recently (though there is litigation in some of those states over it being continued in practice despite the recent formal abolition.)
I agree lack of familiarity isn't because it's "unreal"---we invent words all the time, but I agree with OP that we could have come up with a better name. I bet if you I were to walk down the street here and ask 10 people what Juneteenth is only 1 would be able to do better than: "something to do with freeing the slaves".
And as an aside, I was curious about Festivus. Apparently it's Latin for "excellent, jovial, lively."
The writer of this episode based it on something from his family that his father did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oeu2cVABHg
It's been called Juneteenth for more than a century, and has been a state holiday for almost half a century.
Wouldn't it be even more ridiculous if the US federal government took an existing celebration and renamed it?
Regardless of its history I venture that 95% of the population hadn’t heard the word before 2020, so it’s not like it was in the public consciousness.
You’re right though, even if almost joined knew about it, it _did_ have a name and so def tough to change it.
Picturing a frappe and cappuccino gives you a sense for what a Frappuccino _is_. Picturing june and thirteenth/nineteenth only gives you sense for _when_ it is.
In only contend a better name would be one where the name suggests something about the content to someone hearing it for the first time.
They don’t even give you a sense for _when_ they are. Or, more accurately, they give you the _wrong_ sense for when they are by name alone.
Heck, Juneteenth is a better name, since it is not literally month+day.
That shouldn't be considered a naming failure. It's an education failure.
Easy names require less “education” than hard names.
>I bet if you I were to walk down the street here and ask 10 people what Juneteenth is only 1 would be able to do better than: "something to do with freeing the slaves".
And lots of people think Cinco de Mayo is Mexico's Independence Day, doesn't make the holiday any less valid. It's just an issue of education.
Eventually we’ll all know what it is, but that eventually would be sooner with a better name.
Do you have some basis for thinking this? I rather suspect the reason White Americans don't know about it has more to do with the fact that it celebrates Black American history and culture, which is just not that popular among White Americans. (Of course there are exceptions, but the point is they're exceptions.) I seriously doubt that the name is the problem. The problem is that relatively few people are interested.
Probably because it has the same sort of bad name as Juneteenth.
I'm also going to my local Juneteenth events (in Oakland).. that said, I did have to look it up a few years ago.
EDIT: Yeah, downvote me, I replied to the wrong sub-thread post. Made more sense w/r/t resistance to Juneteenth naming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzPBaC6VPuU
You must be some sort of communist! There's a Trucktober question on the naturalization test, right before the one about Thanksgiving.
So your anecdote isn't useful. Kind of the opposite.
I mean won't every nation have its own history and important days? And it seems to me that those days in every nation will be different. I'd even wager very few of us, (far less than 1%), know what those important days are called in other nations.
- At least one local bank website I've gone to today has a banner saying it is closed and uses the word "Juneteenth."
This seems to be reasonable enough to consider it a real word.
Additionally, the term "Emancipation Day" is inaccurate (and therefore obfuscatory) because slavery is still legal and constitutional if you are convicted of a crime. Emancipation doesn't accurately describe the current state unless this is no longer true. I'm going by this dictionary definition of "emancipation": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/emancipation
The 13th amendment specifically carves out an exception to allow prisoners to be enslaved. They aren't just using political rhetoric: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_exception_clause
You know in movies and cartoons and stuff when you'd see like, a whole bunch of prisoners in striped pajamas, chained together breaking rocks or digging ditches or whatever? Those are depictions of an enslaved workforce.
That being said, I don't doubt that the american prison systems has severe problems, for example the one raised in the other answer to my previous comment.
The difference is so slight as to be meaningless.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, *except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted*, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction
The plain reading of that text is that slavery remains a permitted punishment in the US.
Right after the civil war,
1. slavery became illegal, except as punishment for a crime
2. a ton of vague laws sprung up, like "malicious mischief". Look up "Jim Crow" or "black codes" to get a sense of these.
3. States started "convict-leasing" out prisoners as a source of income, often right back to the plantations that slaves were liberated from before. The convicted were not paid for this labor.
Additional context: Virginia Supreme Court rules that inmates are slaves to the state in 1871: https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/slaves-s... Virginia held the capitol of the Confederacy - the states that tried to leave the USA to retain their slaves.
I forget why the crime exception was added to the 13th amendment, but I assume it was to make it more palatable to the states that still wanted slaves
We Americans don't like doing that either, because it makes us uncomfortable.
>Forced labor for criminals isn't the same as being a slave. They are not owned by the state.
I'm having trouble understanding how it's different. They are held by the state, forced to work, are not free to leave, and we have a bit of a history...
Do you know about black codes? I brought up the "who decides who criminals are" because it starts here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Codes_(United_States)
Again, not comparable to chattel slavery, but related enough that it links to the page for chattel slavery in the first paragraph.
"Since 2018, about 575 companies and more than 100 public agencies in Alabama have used incarcerated people as landscapers, janitors, drivers, metal fabricators and fast-food workers, the lawsuit states, reaping an annual benefit of $450 million."
I thought it was a neologism until I looked it up. Turns out, I'm just white.
> on June 19, 1866… "Jubilee Day"
> The Black community began using the word Juneteenth for Jubilee Day early in the 1890s.
[1] https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/science/020113/great-achie...
Part of it is that it absolutely invokes AAVE. It forces people to consider and be reminded of Black American culture; "Emancipation Day" whitewashes the history a little bit and gives a little too much credit to the so-called "emancipators." Let's keep this centered on Black folks, where it belongs.
Invoking questions is a feature, not a bug.
If you don't already know what "Juneteenth" means, the word itself gives you nothing to help you understand. Literally zilch. It involkes nothing.
"Emancipation Day" does give the outsider a clue.
Names matter.
Also, if Serbia has some holidays that I can't recognize when I read them from a calendar, should Serbia change the names of them for me? Or is it only the words that black Americans use that aren't real when random people don't recognize them?
What you have just told me is a FEATURE. Not a BUG.
I'm very GOOD with people "not immediately knowing." I like that. It forces them to learn about my people and culture.
"Juneteenth" makes you step in and perhaps get a little uncomfortable, like, hmm weird little Black-sounding phrase?
"Emancipation Day" frees (lol) you from engaging, you can just sort of take on the same ol same ol story, which, I imagine for many people starts with Abraham Lincoln and not Black people.
I associate the term with Black people, not because of how it sounds, but because I know what it means and know about it's origin among formerly-enslaved Black communities.
Lord Jesus save me. Tell me you are a software developer without telling me you’re a software developer.
So take from that anecdote what you will, but I’ll admit the name kind of has a modern sound and I don’t think it spurs the kind of curiosity that you hope it does.
Also, FWIW, the name “Emancipation Day” is also a commonly used name for the holiday, though not as common as Juneteenth.
shall we also rename shabbat and yom kippur and purim so that "outsiders" can have a clue?
people are so tone deaf sometimes - it's not for you - it's for the people whose ancestors were freed on this day.
> the word itself gives you nothing to help you understand
neither does any other word that you don't bother to look up in dictionary or encyclopedia.
Observances regularly don't give you a clue what they are about. Like, if you weren't already aware about Martin Luther King, Jr. day, you'd have to Google it to know what's up. Same with Rosh Hashana. Or Eid. I think you might be getting stuck on something that is demonstrably not a unique phenomena and it's reading a little like there's something about Juneteenth itself that's bothering you.
They mostly all have something to do with the ending of slavery but it is different things in different states. For example in Massachusetts it is on July 8th and commemorates slavery being found to be legally unenforceable there under in a 1783 decision.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_Day#United_States
It would be like advocating for Christmas Day to be formally recognised as "Chrisso" or "Chrissie" here in Australia. Yeah we all informally call it that, but it would be embarrassing to codify it.
.. which is hard because when you start making accounts of them you begin to realize how universal and yet unrecognized so many of our contributions are.
Yeah, sorry man, you're rightly getting downvoted to hell here because you're absolutely wrong; it's the reverse that's more often true.
At least five, thank you.
If this is a federal holiday to “center blackness” and “put our attention on black folk”, then that’s state sanctioned racial factionalism and perpetuates an arrogant race centrism that’s already all too prevalent among some segments of black Americans. That I will not celebrate.
We should be creating a society that celebrates Americans, regardless of their skin color. Emancipation day is a great thing, over half a million Americans (many white) died to correct an evil that denied freedom to millions of our fellow Americans - it’s a tragedy so many had to die, but their sacrifice made a better country for all of us.
Juneteenth is in that context as artificial a holiday as Kwanza. I would imagine most other southern states have similar breaks with the Juneteenth holiday, in that it doesn’t represent the historical reality of their community.
The federal holiday was called "Juneteenth" because the existing celebration which it formalizes in law was called "Juneteenth."
Renaming it would have been weird.
If you looked at the adjacent comments you would immediately see a combination of "western christian values," and open pondering that "Epstein is an Israeli asset. Democrats and Republicans have loyalty to Israel." This alone is enough dog whistling for at least my neighborhood's dogs to start acting up.
To put it into terms that may hit closer to home:
Remember Vatican 2? you may have heard about it. pretty big deal, lots of changes in the catholic church, made a whole bunch of news, put the latin mass out to pasture and also pulled back on the doctrine of deicide, ruffled a lot of feathers, etc.
There are some people who yearn for the aesthetics and cultural heritage of the latin mass. They miss the funny words in a language they don't speak, the historical continuity of the latin liturgy, etc. For these types, it's purely innocent aesthetic yearning, mostly harmless.
There are also some people who both miss the latin mass and feel very strongly about the perfidy of the jews being a theologically important teaching. These anti-semitic sedevacantist types share the same information ecology with all of the more harmless latin mass types. Dog whistles are a tool that can be used to disambiguate between the two types of latin-mass-enjoyers.
Fetishizing "western christian values" communicates different things when one of the most prominent far-right groups, the proud boys, makes this a central doctrine. If a latin-mass-enjoyer were to tell me they deeply valued western christian values, before airing their favorite anti-semitic conspiracies, I'm likely to predict they're not into latin mass for purely aesthetic reasons.
It's not about being nice, but on Hacker News we operate according to guidelines and norms that have evolved over more than 15 years, which keep discussions focused on substance and prevent it from burning to the ground the way most online communities do.
Please do your part to make this place better not worse. The point you made above was a valid and valuable one, but the way you expressed it means its value is lost.
If someone else's comment is wrong, respond with an opposing argument. If their comment is inflammatory or in some other way in breach of the guidelines, flag it, and/or report it to us via email. We have several ways of keeping discussion healthy here, but we need everyone to do their part.
"Both sides are the same"
> If someone else's comment is wrong, respond with an opposing argument. If their comment is inflammatory or in some other way in breach of the guidelines, flag it, and/or report it to us via email.
My man - there are well known dog whistles and revisionist accounts of the slave trade in this very comment chain ... And yet the only one that gets flagged is mine. And even so based on what grounds - a flippant remark about Wikipedia being free? Forgive me if I don't take your commitment to "healthy" discourse seriously.
Your comments have been inflammatory and abusive from the very beginning of your participation in the thread, so of course you're attracting flags. But you're certainly not the only commenter getting flags in the thread.
All the feedback mechanisms we offer are here to help you if your intention is to contribute positively to the site. Votes, flags, vouches, email support. If you don't use them, you're in no position to claim that the system is biased against you.
Edit: I'm rate limited
> you're not doing your part to help
... I responded to a comment and pointed out a revisionist take. Did you scold that person too or just me? Do you get it now?
I'm sorry, but what? A quick look at this person's profile has tons of flagged comments on every page. None of it is pretty. I see rants about pretty much every non-White Christian group. You can't just ignore that.
But yeah, almostgotcaught is the one who needs a bollocking because he got a bit testy when the Nazi was goosestepping around ... :-/
The problem in this thread was that almostgotcaught posted multiple escalatory comments, then when I replied to them asking them to stop, which is just routine moderation here, they continued escalating and making swipes against HN's whole approach to moderation and assuming bad faith on our part, rather than doing what many others do and working constructively with us to help HN function better.
They've said elsewhere that they were very upset by the comments and I can understand that. It's a topic that's sensitive and is prone to get people upset. I could have been more considerate of that. It's hard to be considerate when your character is under attack for just doing the job that is expected of you and that you do the same way every day.
The biggest takeaway is that HN can't discuss topics like this without them descending into hellish flamewars, which is disappointing.
The core problem here wasn't @almostgotcaught, it was @typeofhuman. Maybe they could have handled it better, but it really wasn't that bad, and their sharp response really isn't the main problem here.
This is also why flagged comments should just disable replies to the entire thread by the way, instead of just the flagged comment.
I've been doing this work in various forms for a long time, and we've had cases before where dog-whistle comments have been posted, and, in the best instances the way they've been handled by the community has been anti-inflammatory and mature. That is, others reply with sober explanations about what's going on, and send emails to the moderators so we can know about them and take appropriate action (killing comments and banning users). In such cases, the issue was dealt with very effectively and without it turning into a huge meta-drama that gives it much more visibility than it needs to have.
This is ultimately the point I keep trying to make. HN's guidelines and feedback mechanisms are designed to deal with this stuff, and have a track record of dealing with this stuff very effectively when people use them properly, which most people do, most of the time. That could have happened in this case too. When people take matters into their own hands and wage war, everything breaks down.
Trying to flatten the situation into one general group vs another cannot explain the complexity of the situation, like the fact that there were black and mixed-race slave owners, or that Delaware fought for the Union Army despite being a slave state.