We are getting another American holiday, and it’s a great one. I first heard of Juneteenth when I moved to Washington, D.C., in the late 1990s, where there had been official local celebrations of the holiday for a few years.
Over the years, states and localities have steadily recognized Juneteenth. This year, following the death of George Floyd and the nationwide rallies against racism and police brutality, it’s become an unofficial national holiday. Soon that will be official, and maybe soon it will be a paid day off work.
Juneteenth would be a fitting national holiday because the efforts by slaves, free blacks, churches of all colors, Union soldiers, and political leaders to end slavery was the most righteous moral cause Americans have undertaken in our country’s history.
The new holiday also gives us an opportunity to reflect on what holidays are about, beyond just the constant worry that we forget their true meaning (Memorial Day becomes a mere trip to the beach, and Christmas becomes an orgy of conspicuous consumption).
What are holidays? There’s a simple, static view of holidays, which is that they commemorate something great that we accomplished. Independence Day is the day we broke free and enshrined the principles that life and liberty are granted by God and protected by self-government. Glad we did that!
We could view Juneteenth the same way: It was our victory over slavery and our emergence from indefensible wretchedness. Blacks were slaves, but now are free. Whites once were lost, but now are found, were blind but now we see.
Then there’s a more complex view of our national holidays that doesn’t take such a satisfied approach to our holidays. You could call it the gradualist view.
Our holidays represent ideals, under the gradualist view, and they commemorate important first steps taken on a journey on which we’re still marching. On Independence Days throughout history, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and others have appeared at Independence Hall and laid out clearly what needed to be done to more fully attain the principles we articulated in 1776.
Juneteenth, too, can be seen as a time to reassess our gradual progress. We are more equal, and blacks are more free today than they were in 1950, and they were more free in 1950 than they were in 1850. Obviously, there are gains to be made on these fronts. Some on the Left put things in stark terms, as if things are simply horrific now:
#Juneteenth celebrates the end of slavery in the US. But it’s also a reminder that white supremacy & systemic racism remain roadblocks to racial equality & justice today. We recognize the past & present injustices that confront Black Americans every day. And we must do better. https://t.co/Fw2uVpHIx4
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) June 19, 2020
The static approach to holidays is mostly what schools teach children, and which popular culture celebrates. The gradualist approach to holidays, and its refusal to reify the past, is the approach most common in our media and academia today.
The illiberal Left is proposing a third approach to holidays: the iconoclastic approach. They would cancel Columbus Day, tear down George Washington, and declare our founding to be a victory for the forces of slavery and oppression.
But there’s a fourth way to consider holidays, and a sober consideration of our history makes the case for it: The conservative approach.
The static approach is obviously oversimplistic. We don’t simply declare all men are created equal and suddenly get equality. But the gradualist approach is also too simple. There is no one-way arc of history bending toward justice and enlightenment. Often in the course of human history, things get worse.
It was probably worse to be a black man in America in 1915 than it had been 40 years earlier. The Ku Klux Klan had arisen. Jim Crow had spread. Governments stripped previously recognized rights from black people. This wasn’t just worse for blacks, of course, it was morally worse for the white power structure led by Woodrow Wilson, who re-segregated the civil service. Wilson loved to sing odes to science and progress — for him, that meant demeaning people and stripping away their freedom.
Look at the history of revolutions in France, Russia, the Korean Peninsula, or Iran, and it’s impossible to believe that history is a steady march of progress.
It’s possible to lose the good things we’ve gained, particularly at the hands of zealous revolutionaries who think they’re marching us all towards the future. Stepping into the next century or the next decade often means stepping away from freedom, from equality, from dignity, and from virtue. We ought to celebrate our holidays in a way that reflects this knowledge. We ought to use our holidays as an injection of vigilance and a reminder that none of our gains are permanent.
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” Ronald Reagan said in his 1964 speech, “A Time for Choosing.” “We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
This is what Juneteenth, and Independence Day, and Veterans’ Day, and Christmas, and Easter, and Memorial Day, and our other holidays can all be. We shouldn’t mark them as notches in our belt, nor should we simply see them as opportunities to continue a forward march. We need to recall that the march of history, often under the banner of progress and science, can be a march into bondage and depravity.
And so when we celebrate these holidays of freedom, let’s celebrate them as calls to vigilance, exhortations to not lose what we have gained.
