A holiday commemorating emancipation now serves as a plausible news hook for a rote denunciation of the GOP as the party of bigots.
There’s something poetic in the elevation of Juneteenth as a celebration of the emancipation of American slaves. The holiday, which was not well known outside the South until this century, commemorates the fulfillment of the vision articulated in the Emancipation Proclamation but not fully realized until the end of the Civil War. It was only after the 13th Amendment was ratified in the winter of 1865 and the news of slavery’s end finally reached Texas’s enslaved population (along with the vanguard of the Union Army) that June that emancipation became manifest.
“The newness of the holiday for much of the country means that there’s no shared set of traditions associated with it yet,” Washington Post contributor Theodore Johnson observed in a Sunday column. “We need to decide what the holiday will mean for us and for posterity.” Indeed. As a celebration of what it means to be American and the extension of the rights and duties of citizenship to all its people, it is a complement to Independence Day. But there is another trend around this holiday that treats it as a springboard to launch into strained criticisms of the nation and its political culture. One of the shoddier examples of this opportunism was provided by the Daily Beast’s Kali Holloway.
It’s tempting to take this piece as seriously as its editors took it prior to publication — which is to say, not very. The item, on a day that celebrates “the end of nearly 250 years of Vlack [sic] chattel slavery,” spends much of its time attacking state-level Republican lawmakers for, among other offenses, declaring April “Republican History Month” in the State of Tennessee. That would be a touch too self-serving, even for Republicans. The author meant that these and other Republicans are all too willing to apply a hazy gloss to reflections on the Confederacy. (It is, of course, “Confederate History Month.”) Holloway is not without legitimate grievances against a conservative instinct to conserve even that which doesn’t deserve such generous considerations. But Holloway’s most potent arguments are limited to generalizations. When she gets into specifics, she loses her own plot.
“In short,” Holloway declared, “the GOP is the neo-Confederate party.” This claim is “neither hysteria or [sic] hyperbole,” she continues. “With the exception of Virginia, the so-called ‘Heritage Laws’ that long prevented the removal or alteration of confederate monuments in seven states weren’t put into place by Republican legislatures until the 2000s.” Indeed, that would have to have occurred in the 2000s because Republicans didn’t capture control of legislatures in places like Alabama, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana until the early 2010s. The South’s vestigial attachment to the conservative Democrats prevailed well into this century, and southern revisionism predates the 2010 midterm and 2011 off-year elections.
Holloway has some legitimate objections to, for example, the contempt with which GOP candidates such as Mike Pence and Ron DeSantis have treated the effort to purge the home of the 18th Airborne Corps of its association with Confederate General Braxton Bragg. But theirs is a pander to a community of service personnel in and around the Carolinas who maintain a personal attachment to the facility formerly known as Fort Bragg, not a pander to the “neo-Confederates who make up much of their base.”
The author’s grudge against Ron DeSantis is especially pronounced. He is the point of the Republican spear in his campaign of “white terror,” which is represented by a wave of “book bans and removals.” For example, in his attack on one controversial AP African-American studies course, DeSantis communicated to “his status-concerned supporters that there is still strength in white power.” Much like the confederates before him, DeSantis is waging war on “historical accuracy” with the “same end goal of preserving a white supremacist national memory.”
Just the opposite, in fact. DeSantis’s objections were rooted in this high-school course’s attempt to apply presentist narratives and complex postmodern theory to the basics of U.S. history. Students should become familiar with that history before they are taught to apply analytical frameworks to it. Defenders of the coursework, like the primary expositor of intersectional theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw, mourned the extent to which students will no longer dwell on “police brutality, mass incarceration and continuing inequalities” or navigate the influence of “queer theory” on black history. Nor will young Floridians steep themselves in Frantz Fanon’s views on the “cleansing force” of political violence or the academically dubious study of Afrocentricity, the criticism of which is that it is itself revisionist and chauvinistic.
The category errors go on and on. From Holloway’s unsupported assertion that voter-identification laws disenfranchise black voters to the right’s embrace of “murderous figures” such as Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny (despite the wildly divergent circumstances of their respective violent encounters), it all contributes to a tidy theory of everything. From activists such as Christopher Rufo and commentators such as Matt Walsh to Republican politicians as distinct as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nikki Haley, the only variation among them is the relative subtlety they employ in their efforts to popularize anti-black racism. And all of this relates to Juneteenth . . . how? Because Juneteenth serves as a plausible news hook for a rote denunciation of the GOP as the party of bigots.
Maybe Holloway’s views do not merit this level of scrutiny. Her editors didn’t seem to think they did. But her efforts deserve reproach insofar as they represent an attempt to commandeer this holiday and use it as a vehicle for racial agitation. If this tactic catches on, the effect will be to polarize and politicize Juneteenth observance.
There is room in this expansive country for more than one interpretation of its racial history. But Holloway’s transparent effort to launder partisan political narratives and appropriate for herself the gravity of a day devoted to solemn reflections on the abolition of slavery is more exploitative of our shared heritage than anything the Republicans she set out to condemn have done.