Democracy in Peril and Juneteenth Diluted, Too. Thanks, Fellow Americans

The United States is far from finished with the consequences of empowering Donald Trump, and I am tired of ordinary Americans acting as if they don’t know how we got here. First, both political leaders and ordinary citizens tolerated, enabled, and encouraged Trump’s efforts to delegitimize President Barack Obama. Birtherism gained traction because white people use standards to judge everyone but themselves and each other. Americans who consider themselves “good” and “decent” allowed a campaign of suspicion about Obama’s credentials while the accuser’s credentials did not matter, because whiteness was the only qualification needed.

The country is still paying the price. With 600K deaths and counting, we continue to deal with how the Trump administration allowed COVID-19 to ravage the nation. Also still circulating because Trump’s influence remains: the disinformation fueling mask protests and vaccine refusals among white conservatives. Then, there’s the big lie that inspired the January 6^th attack on the capitol. Trump’s hold on the GOP and the nation has been challenged more by Twitter and Facebook policies than by senators who swore to prioritize democracy.

My disappointment does not end with senators, though, because ordinary Americans allowed Trump to ride the wave of birtherism into the White House. The majority of “good” and “decent” Americans failed to mobilize when he launched his presidential campaign by calling Mexicans “rapists.” The “good” and “decent” did not launch organized opposition when he mocked the reporter with disabilities. Larger numbers of ordinary Americans were organizing by the time the “grab ‘em by the p—-” recording emerged, but much of that action was private and certainly too little too late. My sluggish fellow Americans finally began to feel some urgency after 3 years of watching a president embody what they reluctantly recognized as incompetence and villain-level narcissism and callousness.

Only at this point did ordinary Americans begin demanding fewer unchecked lies from the nation’s seat of power. That’s when the media’s go-to strategy became fact-checking, sometimes in real time.

This is how the unanimous passing of the Juneteenth bill became more evidence of Trump’s reverberating impact.

Bills on this issue were introduced last summer by Senator Ed Markey and one of my hometown heroes, Houston’s Sheila Jackson Lee. Neither got a floor vote, so the bills were re-introduced this year.

I don’t discount their work. Nevertheless, the consequences of my fellow citizens emboldening Trump from the early days of birtherism are all over the passage of this bill.

In summer 2020, as the nation grappled with the killings of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, and others, Trump claimed that no one knew about Juneteenth until he talked about it. Media outlets immediately began proving that Juneteenth had been commemorated for generations. As had become a pattern, Trump lied and then the media poured energy into showing that it was a lie. I was annoyed watching it because it repeated the cycle of Black people’s actual truths getting lost because the entire (well meaning) approach was defensive. That is, the goal was proving that a basic fact was a fact, so everything became about that—not about Juneteenth and Black people’s lives, experiences, and culture.

To prove that something that has existed for generations does, in fact, exist is to meet an incredibly impoverished standard, so the national conversation was necessarily basic and missed the point. The point should have been that Juneteenth celebrations demonstrate African Americans’ investment in honoring their ancestors’ resiliency while facing injustices heaped on them in the only home they’ve known. And these celebrations represent Black Americans’ refusal to let white lies replace their own cultural knowledge.

I grew up in a small community: Thompson Chapel in Sugar Land, just outside of Houston. My neighbor, Harold “Peto” Williams, sponsored a Juneteenth celebration every year from 1980, when it became a state holiday, to 2003. I attended from the age of 5 to 18, when I went away to college in 1992. Those commemorations helped make me who I am today. American culture never tires of diminishing, denigrating, and demonizing Black people, but on June 19^th, I encountered life-affirming messages that school and nearly every powerful institution withheld from me.

Being affirmed by the community cultivated by Juneteenth helped me develop in ways that have saved me from believing the death-dealing lies routinely told about who I am and who my people have been. I see how shamelessly American culture (not only news and popular entertainment but also laws and public policies) must lie in order to convince citizens that white folk deserve to be the main people who enjoy anything society deems desirable.

Likewise, I see how much lying and withholding of information is required for today’s conservatives to be happy. The disingenuous claims that schools teach critical race theory and must therefore be reined in strike me as similar to the lying and withholding that Texas enslavers were invested in upon learning of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Symbolic gestures like this new federal holiday matter, but I can’t ignore the limits. American culture is so steeped in white domination that everything is seen as being granted by white people—including ordinary ones. Do white people approve of a change that tangentially acknowledges Black people’s right to belong? That question consistently, even if implicitly, shapes countless news stories.

Last summer, people of color and white allies called for defunding police departments and funding social services in communities of color in the same way that white neighborhoods enjoy an abundance of public services and a scarcity of surveillance.

What gets granted instead? The Juneteenth holiday.

Could an outcome be any more American than that?

It is the American way to remind Black people of their “proper” (subordinate) place in society while insisting that crumbs be celebrated. After all, this victory 1) does not necessarily build understanding of, or appreciation for, what Black people experience, and 2) does not benefit Black people specifically. Everyone potentially gets a day off. Hooray. Who cares if you use it to go to your neo-Nazi meeting. That’s not the Senate’s concern, given that they won’t even investigate January 6^th.