Here’s a simple way to honor Juneteenth. Invest in my work as a historian of race in the U.S. I do the truth-telling that confronts white Christian nationalist myths. You can support. This Juneteenth, become a paid subscriber.
Two anniversaries fall just weeks apart this summer, and they ask two very different questions.
America 250 asks: how great have we been? Juneteenth asks: how free are we, really?
That second question doesn’t have a comfortable answer.
A Question We Must Answer
How free are we, really, when majority-Black voting districts are being redrawn right now to dilute Black political power?
How free are we, really, when the wealth gap between white and Black families hasn’t closed?
How free are we, really, when Black people remain disproportionately incarcerated, and unarmed Black people are still killed with little accountability?
Juneteenth is a cause for celebration. But it doesn’t stop there. It demands an reckoning.
Two Different Risks
This year, each holiday faces a distinct danger.
America 250 risks becoming a sanitized pageant of “Christian nation” mythology designed to paper over the very history Juneteenth insists we remember.
Juneteenth risks the opposite. Getting hollowed out into just a cookout stripped of its connection to slavery, resistance, and the Black freedom struggle that earned it.
Both failures end with the hard and necessary history erased.
You can’t responsibly celebrate America’s anniversary while erasing the 250 years we spent in bondage before emancipation.
So this year, let Juneteenth set the terms for America 250.
Name the cost, celebrate the real progress, and refuse any version of the story that makes Black freedom a footnote rather than the foundation of U.S. history.
Catch the full replay, where I walk through the complete ten-point comparison.
In This Episode:
The origins of Juneteenth and General Order No. 3
Why the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t actually free enslaved people
How U.S. slavery was uniquely race-based, matrilineal, and perpetual
The White House’s “Freedom 250” initiative and PragerU’s Freedom Trucks
A 10-point comparison of Juneteenth and America 250
How white and Black Americans might commemorate Juneteenth differently
How are you celebrating Juneteenth? How does that differ from what you plan to do on the Fourth of July?
P.S. I’ll be on a panel hosted by Sojourners talking about America 250. It’s free. All you have to do is register. Read my feature article HERE.
