Happy Juneteenth!

23 shot, at least one killed in Chicago's Juneteenth weekend celebrations.

It's almost as if The Regime just throwing endless Zero-Cost Virtue Signals and dropping endless Self-Esteem Bombs on the black community isn't fixing the actual problems.

But put that thought out of your mind. At the liberal propaganda mill The Dispatch, fat drunk Chris Stirewalk praies Juneteenth as a "day to reflect."

Apologists for American slavery often employ relativistic arguments: Legal slavery was part of human society from its earliest days and persisted in the world for decades after it was abolished here. In some places, it persists even today.

These things are true, and historical context is important. We can't hold people of the past to modern standards. But we can hold them to their own.

The very absence of the words "slave" or "slavery" from the Constitution speaks to the shame the framers felt. We can grant reality--that the politics of the time meant the debate in Philadelphia in 1787 wasn't whether the Constitution would permit slavery or not, but rather whether we would have a Constitution or not--but we can't pretend that it was undertaken without knowledge of the evils involved.

It was an ugly calculation, and it required three key compromises in the document: Anti-slavery delegates agreed to allow 20 years before banning the international slave trade, which was already odious in much of Western society; Southern delegates agreed to get credit for only three-fifths of their enslaved people in determining congressional representation and Electoral College votes...

Enough, fatboy.

John Hayward @Doc_0

One reason Juneteenth isn't catching on organically with the general public is that it's obviously a politicized partisan "holiday," not a celebration where all Americans are invited to join hands and rejoice in a great achievement. That's what it should be, but it isn't.

The rest of our political culture loudly insists every day that no "victory" has been won against slavery or racism. We're told they are the founding sins of America, for which there will never be atonement or forgiveness. We're told "white supremacy" remains a systemic problem.

If anything, our hysterical racial grievance industry and the ruling Democrat Party say racism and white supremacy are getting WORSE. We're all supposed to feel perpetually guilty and submissive to endless demands for reparations. So what great victory does Juneteenth celebrate?

You can't introduce a "holiday" like this into the context of pervasive grievance-mongering and identity politics and expect people to just say, "Sounds lovely, let's join hands and celebrate!" Every OTHER day, white Americans are told nobody wants to join hands with them.

Our deranged identity politics industry is busy creating white-adjacent categories they can shove disobedient minority groups into - as though whiteness were a contagious disease. Black Americans are told every day that sinister forces are stacking every deck against them.

The Democrat Party is wholly dedicated to stoking racial grievances for political and financial gain - the man in the White House is infamous for yelling "they're gonna put y'all back in CHAINZZ" - so the new federal holiday is naturally viewed with skepticism. Context matters.

CHAINZZZ.

Persuading more states to commemorate Juneteenth would have been a better way to go, but as we know, the totalitarian Left has no patience for representative government. It had to be imposed top-down after the George Floyd riots - a flex of power, not persuasion.

And now look at what we've got: a bloodbath. Juneteenth murder sprees. The long, slow work of creating a more harmonious nation, of putting racism and grievances behind us instead of nuclear-weaponizing them, would have produced a better holiday.

Americans know the calendar is being chopped up into more identity-grievance days and months, pushed on them with corporate and government power instead of fellowship. True holidays spring from goodwill: from people seeing the best in others and offering it from themselves.

If you want to plant a new holiday and have everyone feel comfortable beneath its spreading branches, you need the fertile soil of goodwill, a sense that everyone is invited but no one is commanded. Too much of our political culture is barren of that soil right now. /end

Tom Elliot drops some knowledge about Juneteenth.

And CNN decides to make a race struggle issue of... Father's Day.

Note that this study examines families in which the father is present. In 45% of black families, the father is not present.

But other than that -- great job, excellent value!

posted by Ace at 05:30 PM

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