Someone once tried to make the argument to me that African Americans should feel eternal gratitude toward whites for fighting a war to free them. The fact of the matter is that America is one of the very few countries in history to fight a war to keep slavery.
Idk why so many people are upset or arguing. Sorry to add to the noise but I’m a naturalized citizen here and I feel like USA has so much history of doing better and moving things forward for everyone.
People all operate independently in thought here, but somehow since 1776 they have genuinely pushed society forward all things considered.
Everyone acting out of self interest but in a direction where things get better, objectively speaking, makes it a good society.
It is superior to living under dictatorships, corruption rotted “democracies”, or religious intolerance where the people always lose.
I substantially prefer the term "Emancipation Day," as it gets the point across more clearly. Lots of people don't know what "Juneteenth" means, since it's not a real word.
I cannot possibly disagree with this more, "Juneteenth" is far superior.
Part of it is that it absolutely invokes AAVE. It forces people to consider and be reminded of Black American culture; "Emancipation Day" whitewashes the history a little bit and gives a little too much credit to the so-called "emancipators." Let's keep this centered on Black folks, where it belongs.
Ah, just like Easter, Christmas, Ramadan, Fat Tuesday, Valentine's Day, Purim, Holi, Passover, Cinco De Mayo, D-Day, etc. etc. etc.
Observances regularly don't give you a clue what they are about. Like, if you weren't already aware about Martin Luther King, Jr. day, you'd have to Google it to know what's up. Same with Rosh Hashana. Or Eid. I think you might be getting stuck on something that is demonstrably not a unique phenomena and it's reading a little like there's something about Juneteenth itself that's bothering you.
What you have just told me is a FEATURE. Not a BUG.
I'm very GOOD with people "not immediately knowing." I like that. It forces them to learn about my people and culture.
"Juneteenth" makes you step in and perhaps get a little uncomfortable, like, hmm weird little Black-sounding phrase?
"Emancipation Day" frees (lol) you from engaging, you can just sort of take on the same ol same ol story, which, I imagine for many people starts with Abraham Lincoln and not Black people.
I didn't realize "Juneteenth" was considered "Black-sounding" by some people. Juneteenth is a pretty culturally mainstream term (being a national holiday). And forming new words using contractions doesn't seem like a typically Black-person thing to do.
I associate the term with Black people, not because of how it sounds, but because I know what it means and know about it's origin among formerly-enslaved Black communities.
I had this conversation with a group of people today and literally not one of them knew its true origin and the word never propelled them to look into it further. They just assumed (correctly) that someone came up with the name because it’s in June and the nineTEENTH day, but they didn’t realize the term was actually used long ago.
So take from that anecdote what you will, but I’ll admit the name kind of has a modern sound and I don’t think it spurs the kind of curiosity that you hope it does.
Also, FWIW, the name “Emancipation Day” is also a commonly used name for the holiday, though not as common as Juneteenth.
I mean... you could just look it up, if you didn't know. Plenty of places have obscurely-named holidays (for instance, a number of countries have Whit Monday as a holiday; good luck figuring out what _that_ is from the name...)
Also, if Serbia has some holidays that I can't recognize when I read them from a calendar, should Serbia change the names of them for me? Or is it only the words that black Americans use that aren't real when random people don't recognize them?
The western, Christian values explicitly had slavery in them. The slave owners were Christian. I don't really see how religion has to do with the abolishment of race-based slavery, sadly.
I don't care enough to waste my time learning about America's latest attempt at making themselves feel better about their barbaric cultural history.
I'm simply commenting that "emanicipation day" is much clearer than "Juneteenth" - whether that's a good thing or not I have no opinion on as it has nothing to do with me.
By people in a small community in Texas and nowhere else. No one elsewhere heard of this thing till now. Now everyone pretends it's a big deal but it was strictly a local event there. You never heard of it till Biden's group brought it up. I bet I'm older than you (the reader). I never heard of this till Biden brought it up.
This holiday is beyond stupid when you consider that the guy who freed the slaves, Abraham Lincoln, doesn't have a Federal holiday where one gets the day off.
> I bet I'm older than you (the reader). I never heard of this till Biden brought it up.
I'm in my mid-50s, maybe you are older than me. It's something I had heard about in the 2015-2020 timeframe. I'm white as fuck, but being online meant I saw tweet threads or short explainers about it for a few years. I didn't meet folks who celebrated it, but when I asked around to Black folks I knew they were like, "Yeah, it's a thing."
So I suspect that the holiday gained momentum among Black Americans and spread out from Texas sometime prior to me hearing about it, perhaps with the rise of social media, and then us folks who are out of the loop started hearing about it later. (Either through our own social media intake or through the declaration of a federal holiday.)
> This holiday is beyond stupid when you consider that the guy who freed the slaves, Abraham Lincoln, doesn't have a Federal holiday where one gets the day off.
Black people make up about 13% of the US population. Why would we need two national holidays about the same thing, essentially? Especially when the root of both would be the same thing.
Theres no straw man arugement here. The fact is everything is on the internet. Telling someone their ignorant because its on the internet is a half truth. Its like saying I graduated from Harvard and therefore I had the best education money could buy and theres no way i'm ignorant. The straw was the ignorant comment and not providing what it is why it should be celebrated by Americans.
Nah it’s really easy to understand Juneteenth if you just google it. Let’s not argue on the fringes of the subject and claim it applies here. Ignorant people always have excuses for why it’s too hard to become educated on a simple subject.
It is an old neologism, but the style feels surprisingly modern, and/or AAVE is so dominant today that even (youngish?) white people would have coined this type of abbreviation today.
> on June 19, 1866… "Jubilee Day"
> The Black community began using the word Juneteenth for Jubilee Day early in the 1890s.
As far as I know most people consider Emancipation Day the day that the Emancipation Proclamation was signed into law in 1863, whereas Juneteenth marks the day 2.5 years later that the last known enslaved people were freed from the people who decided to just not tell them about the law.
> Juneteenth marks the day 2.5 years later that the last known enslaved people were freed
Nope, just the last in the Confederate States; the last Union chattel slaves (e.g., in Delaware) were freed by operation of law a few months later with the ratification of the 13th Amendment.
(And that's not even discussing penal slavery allowed under the 13th Amendment.)
>(And that's not even discussing penal slavery allowed under the 13th Amendment.)
To expand on this, knowingbetter did an in-depth video on this topic[0]. The salient bit is that penal slavery was ended in 1941-1942 by Roosevelt, so that the Japanese couldn't use it as war propaganda against the US.
This is not true. The last slaves in the United States were set free by the thirteenth amendment in Delaware, IIRC. Emancipation Day could make sense as the last slaves freed by the emancipation proclamation took place on that date.
A common misconception holds that the Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves in the United States, or that the General Order No. 3 on June 19, 1865, marked the end of slavery in the United States. In fact, the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified and proclaimed in December 1865, was the article that made slavery illegal in the United States nationwide, not the Emancipation Proclamation.[6][7][8][9]
Another common misconception is that it took over two years for news of the Emancipation Proclamation to reach Texas, and that slaves did not know they had already been freed by it. In fact, news of the Proclamation had reached Texas long before 1865, and many slaves knew about Lincoln's order emancipating them, but they had not been freed since the Union army had yet to reach Texas to enforce the Proclamation. Only after the arrival of the Union army and General Order No. 3 was the Proclamation widely enforced in Texas.
Regardless, people have been calling it Juneteenth for over a hundred years, it was made a national holiday as Juneteenth, I'm gonna keep calling it that.
In Texas and maybe celebrated in other places(I haven't done the research) this is true. For a large swath of the United States it was obscure or unknown. Most of us learned about the Emancipation Proclamation though. Making Juneteenth a holiday rather than the Date of the Emancipation Proclamation is odd to me. It is as odd to me as say, celebrating Independence Day on the date the last colony got word of the signing on, hypothetically, July 5th.
The Emancipation Proclamation freed very few slaves. The order did not apply to areas of the Union which still had slaves, nor did it apply to areas of the Confederacy occupied by the Union. Although, it did apply to unoccupied areas of the Confederacy. The government of the Confederacy was unlikely to follow an order issued by the Union during the Civil War.
It may have encouraged some slaves in the Confederacy to flee, if they found out about it.
>The last slaves in the United States were set free by the thirteenth amendment
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
You may be surprised to learn that, coincidentally, America has more people in prison than anywhere else.
Did the Emancipation Proclamation actual emancipate anybody? The South didn't free them and the proclamation explicitly allowed the Northern states that had slavery to continue to have slaves.
Yes it did. When the Northern army was in Southern territory they would free the local slaves. They would then recruit volunteers into the army. Not sure how many they freed but they did pick up about 200k soldiers that way.
African-Americans in coastal California for the most part do not care about Juneteenth.. African-American politicians do try to get a photo op. A very large majority of low income African-Americans in North and Southern California, do not care about this day, do not mention it, do not do special events for it, do not mark it on any calendar or gather with special clothes on for it. compare and contrast to "Kwanzaa" also
> Black Americans in coastal California do not care about Juneteenth..
Some do, some don't. "Black Americans in Coastal California" aren't a homogenous group, and this varies a lot by things like family geographic history, socioeconomic status, and a variety of other factors.
Sorry, what do you guys mean by "been there, done that"?
Do you mean that you're slave descended black americans, and, in the case of HN User mistrial9, therefore speak for most of the slave descended black americans in coastal California?
Or do you guys mean that you celebrate Juneteenth. Thus, "been there, done that"?
The former I would challenge you on, despite obviously not being "black american coastal Californian?". The latter I would never challenge you on as that's your business.
Trucktober and Frappuccino aren't "real words" but most Americans know what they mean. The unfamiliarity with Juneteenth is not due to the unrealness of the word.
Both of those are portmanteau's, giving hints as to their meaning. No such thing with Juneteenth.
I agree lack of familiarity isn't because it's "unreal"---we invent words all the time, but I agree with OP that we could have come up with a better name. I bet if you I were to walk down the street here and ask 10 people what Juneteenth is only 1 would be able to do better than: "something to do with freeing the slaves".
Agree it’s a silly nitpick of language. I’ll keep picking.
Picturing a frappe and cappuccino gives you a sense for what a Frappuccino _is_. Picturing june and thirteenth/nineteenth only gives you sense for _when_ it is.
In only contend a better name would be one where the name suggests something about the content to someone hearing it for the first time.
Another American holiday coming up with an equally useless name is Fourth of July. Nobody seems to have a problem with that name, and nobody I know calls it Independence Day. Neither Fourth of July or Juneteenth are great names out of context, but they both have histories behind them and can't be changed anymore.
Heck, Juneteenth is a better name, since it is not literally month+day.
The name of the holiday, so named by the people affected, is a century and change old. The problem isn't the quality of the name, which is where we started.
I'm white AF and this thread is cringe. "We" didn't name it, for starters. It would take an electron microscope to find the amount of self-awareness to avoid suggesting better alternatives. Damn.
June (nine)teenth, seems pretty straightforward to me. Clearer than All Hallows' Evening --> Halloween.
>I bet if you I were to walk down the street here and ask 10 people what Juneteenth is only 1 would be able to do better than: "something to do with freeing the slaves".
And lots of people think Cinco de Mayo is Mexico's Independence Day, doesn't make the holiday any less valid. It's just an issue of education.
> but that eventually would be sooner with a better name
Do you have some basis for thinking this? I rather suspect the reason White Americans don't know about it has more to do with the fact that it celebrates Black American history and culture, which is just not that popular among White Americans. (Of course there are exceptions, but the point is they're exceptions.) I seriously doubt that the name is the problem. The problem is that relatively few people are interested.
Juneteenth is the same sort of portmanteau as Trucktober. Plus holidays have weird names. What's a Christmas, a Mardi Gras, a Festivus? It's almost entirely a matter of usage and familiarity.
I’m not dying on this hill, I just think the name could be better, but I don’t particularly care. It’s not as though I’ve got a beef with the celebrating the freedom of slaves. I think that’s essential for America to celebrate.
It's simply important, while celebrating slavery, to correct the way that black people speak. Just so they'll be understood. Just so they'll know that regular people don't talk like that.
I don't know what your point is. You know Frappaccino? So his point stands? Regardless of his examples, we deal with no end of made up nonsense words, rarely anybody bats an eye until it sounds black and has to do with black people.And yes, this is a thing, this thread is the umpteenth one I've encountered today with people undermining and questioning the name for what amounts to it sounding black.
So your anecdote isn't useful. Kind of the opposite.
I'm pretty sure less than 1% of people in the EU would know what Juneteenth means. I didn't remember either. I just remembered I read it somewhere before and would have guessed it was something like pi day or star wars day.
Why would anyone in Europe, know when the slaves in the US were freed? Or even when the slaves in Brazil were freed? Or Peru? Or Colombia? Or Cuba?
I mean won't every nation have its own history and important days? And it seems to me that those days in every nation will be different. I'd even wager very few of us, (far less than 1%), know what those important days are called in other nations.
It’s not just an argument of name, it’s an argument of when. Go down to Charleston, SC where the local black population celebrates Emancipation Day on January 1st and has for a long, long time.
Juneteenth is in that context as artificial a holiday as Kwanza. I would imagine most other southern states have similar breaks with the Juneteenth holiday, in that it doesn’t represent the historical reality of their community.
Not to be snarky, but they should just learn what it means? I could just as easily not know what emancipation means. I frankly have some family members that I'm sure don't.
- At least one local bank website I've gone to today has a banner saying it is closed and uses the word "Juneteenth."
This seems to be reasonable enough to consider it a real word.
Additionally, the term "Emancipation Day" is inaccurate (and therefore obfuscatory) because slavery is still legal and constitutional if you are convicted of a crime. Emancipation doesn't accurately describe the current state unless this is no longer true. I'm going by this dictionary definition of "emancipation": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/emancipation
Here's an article, the power relationship was exercised by denying parole that would have otherwise been granted without a profit motive:
https://archive.ph/0gVie
"Since 2018, about 575 companies and more than 100 public agencies in Alabama have used incarcerated people as landscapers, janitors, drivers, metal fabricators and fast-food workers, the lawsuit states, reaping an annual benefit of $450 million."
You know in movies and cartoons and stuff when you'd see like, a whole bunch of prisoners in striped pajamas, chained together breaking rocks or digging ditches or whatever? Those are depictions of an enslaved workforce.
Forced labor for criminals isn't the same as being a slave. They are not owned by the state.
We have a similar sounding exception clause in Germany, and nobody would call the prisoners slaves.
That being said, I don't doubt that the american prison systems has severe problems, for example the one raised in the other answer to my previous comment.
The text of the 13th amendment makes a direct equivalence between the chattel slavery it outlawed and the incarcerated forced labor that it left unaffected:
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, *except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted*, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction
The plain reading of that text is that slavery remains a permitted punishment in the US.
1. slavery became illegal, except as punishment for a crime
2. a ton of vague laws sprung up, like "malicious mischief". Look up "Jim Crow" or "black codes" to get a sense of these.
3. States started "convict-leasing" out prisoners as a source of income, often right back to the plantations that slaves were liberated from before. The convicted were not paid for this labor.
Additional context: Virginia Supreme Court rules that inmates are slaves to the state in 1871: https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/slaves-s... Virginia held the capitol of the Confederacy - the states that tried to leave the USA to retain their slaves.
I forget why the crime exception was added to the 13th amendment, but I assume it was to make it more palatable to the states that still wanted slaves
We Americans don't like doing that either, because it makes us uncomfortable.
>Forced labor for criminals isn't the same as being a slave. They are not owned by the state.
I'm having trouble understanding how it's different. They are held by the state, forced to work, are not free to leave, and we have a bit of a history...
So we've come to the difference of opinions, which is that your definition of slavery excludes those convicted of a crime, while others' doesn't. Not a very interesting point to debate on.
Yes, I think there is a difference between being kidnapped from your home, shipped across the ocean and sold into a life of servitude (with any children you have being born into the same condition, or yourself being born into such a situation) vs. doing labor as part of a sentence for a crime of which you have been duly convicted (and will someday be released from). That is my opinion.
Would your opinion change if the legal system that permitted people to be kidnapped, shipped, and sold, was the same system that decided if you're a criminal fit to be kidnapped, shipped, and sold?
You might not have heard about it before then but it’s been celebrated since the Reconstruction era and it became a state holiday starting with Texas in 1938, making it roughly as old as Veterans’ Day.
>I just cannot believe people can just fly the confederate flag and not be thrown into prison or worse. Same with Nazis.
Yeah, this is how things like freedom of expression and free speech clauses to the constitution work, they prohibit imprisoning ("or worse") people for displaying symbols of their preference, just because you don't like them, even if they're racist, as long as they're not actually committing violence against others.
Does your "or worse" refer to torturing people for these things perhaps? Congratulations, you're about as shitty as any garden variety authoritarian, racist or not.
We have a president doing his best to winnow down the 1st amendment against his particular brand of dislike, and on the other hand idiocies like what you demand doing it from another end. In both cases, emotionally claiming that what they want to restrict is "dangerous".
>If a house divided will inevitably fall, then certainly, a house that tolerates people advocating destruction of the house will also fall.
If your notion of a house divided means anyone not sharing your worldview then being imprisoned ("or worse"), it's you, or people like you who are really the problem in a country where it's exactly the kind of authoritarian bullshit you vomit that has been largely rejected by centuries of constitutional protections.
We can look to German society for an alternative balance on the principles of free speech and Nazism. Germany isn't doing too bad as a society in terms of individual liberty and prosperity. One might argue they're better governed than any particular state in the US, or the US overall.
Germans also understand Nazis better than the US and they decided their democracy doesn't need it.
Modern Germany has its fair share of problems with how the state can define permitted speech and use it to censor selectively. Since the legacy of the Nazi era is still there, along with the legacy of the Stasi era, German society and government are generally careful to not go overboard on certain things, but this would apply either way. Does anyone really think that the only thing stopping the resurgence of Nazism is a law prohibiting swastikas and certain kinds of speech? No, it's a general social tendency towards avoiding strong authoritarian trends, based on some of the worst historical experience possible.
In essence, these laws don't really "help" anyhow in terms of stopping any serious movement toward extremism, while on the other hand sometimes selectively being used to censor in completely nonsensical ways.
Also worth noting, historically, it was exactly a fear of letting deeply hated ideological enemies of the country's conservative elements that caused the Weimar conservatives to make justifications for censoring ideologically opposed viewpoints and "protecting the nation" against their definition of treason through laws that created loopholes for authoritarian control. This very same perceived need led them to an alliance with the Nazis and the formation of the Hitler cabinet of 1933, after which the much more extreme Hitler used the same legal loopholes -so easily exploitable by serious authoritarians- to completely destroy the Weimar Republic and all of its existing political, social and individual freedoms.
The so-called paradox of tolerance is bullshit. It was specifically intolerance and legal mechanisms for its expression against supposedly extreme viewpoints, that destroyed Weimar Germany and led to Nazi Germany. I have yet to see a country where too much free expression leads to more repression. The exact opposite is the case everywhere you look. Politicians and ideologues establish "reasonable" limits on extremist speech and later expand those ever more censoriously as they redefine extremism or treason to include anything that supposedly divides the nation, ie: goes against their views of a unified political system.
Nah, if your freespeech involves treason and rebellion you no longer have rights.
No, "worse" meant capital punishment (the universal punishment for that crime). The only good traitor is a dead traitor. Don't betray your country. Don't fly the flags of its enemies. I am fine with a moderate punishment (1-2 years in prison), I just expected society to treat it with the seriousness it deserves.
If you conspire to kill someone or rob a bank, that's a conspiracy charge. if you run around dressed and armed like a militia and wearing confederate flags, threatening race wars, then it's free speech. that makes no sense.
This isn't an unpopular sentiment outside the US as you think. I like germany's approach to the problem. the punishment isn't severe but just enough. Try the nazi salute in germany or flying the nazi flag and you'll see what happens.
Your argument is a logical fallacy (slipperly slope). No, I am not suggesting arbitrary banning of arbitrary symbols and flags I dislike, there is no slippery slope. If an entity is declared an enemy of the united states by the democratically elected government of the united states, then you don't get to fly its flags on american soil without consequence. You don't get to fly ISIS or al-qaeda flags just the same as confederate and nazi flags. I am not against flying random KKK or white supremacist flags (well I am, I just don't think that should be illegal). Displaying symbols or making speech in advocacy of a declared enemy of your country shouldn't be legal.
If the checks and balances of government allow Trump to declare an entity enemy of the state then yeah, you can't fly their flags either. That's how democracy works, don't elect people who are not trustworthy. The constitution is not a religion and freedom of speech means nothing without a stable country to administer it.
Being intolerant to some speech is necessary for the preservation of free speech. Free speech doesn't mean you get to say anything without consequence (can't yell fire in a crowd, I'd say rebellion is worse than that!).
Treason and rebellion is worse than mass murder! that's our disconnect. you see it as an opinion, I see it as something so horrific that I wouldn't be all that upset if the person's precious life (and even in case of murder I don't support capital punishment, except for extreme cases) was taken from them. War and the death of millions of innocents is what I equate treason and rebellion with, and not just death but so much human suffering that lasts decades (see the misery of post-civil-war reconstruction!).
> Nah, if your freespeech involves treason and rebellion you no longer have rights
Do that and you can guarantee that it’ll be used against you. I abhor people who fly those flags, I’ll personally stomp their faces, but the government shouldn’t be allowed to stop them or else your run into the issue of what treasonous speech is. I firmly believe the people (society in general) should hold all of the power when it comes to policing speech.
Like I said, this isn't arbitrary, if I start flying the flags of my country's enemies, then like any other law it should apply to me. Who gets to decide who the enemy is? The democratically elected legislators and officials. Plenty of countries with better free-speech and free-press protections than the US ban things like this, holocaust denial, etc... it isn't a slippery slope.
Right now, the 'enemies' of the democratically elected leaders are Democrats and Socialists. You think jail time for being a member of the DSA is reasonable? That's democracy working as intended? (That said, the US is not a democracy, and it's really important to remember that, because we do value some votes more highly than others and put significant barriers in place to prevent everyone from voting.)
That's not a slippery slope, the admin is on the record saying that socialists are their enemies. I don't want to give them the power to go after anyone who might be a socialist. Especially when they are carting people off to death camps in foreign countries.
That's likely a reference to the show "Cuties" which was a rage-provocateur for awhile.
I cannot make assertions about the show, only that I am passingly familiar with the internet's larger distaste for the show based on allegations of exploitation of minors.
Oh wow, I've even seen this movie, and I didn't pick up on what they were referring to. I vaguely remember some controversy, and being unable to get worked up about it. Thanks for reminding me.
The value system and moral framework of the abolishinists spanned beyond the confines of country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...
wikipedia is free.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Idk why so many people are upset or arguing. Sorry to add to the noise but I’m a naturalized citizen here and I feel like USA has so much history of doing better and moving things forward for everyone.
People all operate independently in thought here, but somehow since 1776 they have genuinely pushed society forward all things considered.
Everyone acting out of self interest but in a direction where things get better, objectively speaking, makes it a good society.
It is superior to living under dictatorships, corruption rotted “democracies”, or religious intolerance where the people always lose.
Part of it is that it absolutely invokes AAVE. It forces people to consider and be reminded of Black American culture; "Emancipation Day" whitewashes the history a little bit and gives a little too much credit to the so-called "emancipators." Let's keep this centered on Black folks, where it belongs.
Invoking questions is a feature, not a bug.
If you don't already know what "Juneteenth" means, the word itself gives you nothing to help you understand. Literally zilch. It involkes nothing.
"Emancipation Day" does give the outsider a clue.
Names matter.
Observances regularly don't give you a clue what they are about. Like, if you weren't already aware about Martin Luther King, Jr. day, you'd have to Google it to know what's up. Same with Rosh Hashana. Or Eid. I think you might be getting stuck on something that is demonstrably not a unique phenomena and it's reading a little like there's something about Juneteenth itself that's bothering you.
What you have just told me is a FEATURE. Not a BUG.
I'm very GOOD with people "not immediately knowing." I like that. It forces them to learn about my people and culture.
"Juneteenth" makes you step in and perhaps get a little uncomfortable, like, hmm weird little Black-sounding phrase?
"Emancipation Day" frees (lol) you from engaging, you can just sort of take on the same ol same ol story, which, I imagine for many people starts with Abraham Lincoln and not Black people.
I associate the term with Black people, not because of how it sounds, but because I know what it means and know about it's origin among formerly-enslaved Black communities.
So take from that anecdote what you will, but I’ll admit the name kind of has a modern sound and I don’t think it spurs the kind of curiosity that you hope it does.
Also, FWIW, the name “Emancipation Day” is also a commonly used name for the holiday, though not as common as Juneteenth.
Also, if Serbia has some holidays that I can't recognize when I read them from a calendar, should Serbia change the names of them for me? Or is it only the words that black Americans use that aren't real when random people don't recognize them?
shall we also rename shabbat and yom kippur and purim so that "outsiders" can have a clue?
people are so tone deaf sometimes - it's not for you - it's for the people whose ancestors were freed on this day.
> the word itself gives you nothing to help you understand
neither does any other word that you don't bother to look up in dictionary or encyclopedia.
I'm simply commenting that "emanicipation day" is much clearer than "Juneteenth" - whether that's a good thing or not I have no opinion on as it has nothing to do with me.
This isn't a new phenomena. Juneteenth has been celebrated for well over a hundred years now.
This holiday is beyond stupid when you consider that the guy who freed the slaves, Abraham Lincoln, doesn't have a Federal holiday where one gets the day off.
I'm in my mid-50s, maybe you are older than me. It's something I had heard about in the 2015-2020 timeframe. I'm white as fuck, but being online meant I saw tweet threads or short explainers about it for a few years. I didn't meet folks who celebrated it, but when I asked around to Black folks I knew they were like, "Yeah, it's a thing."
So I suspect that the holiday gained momentum among Black Americans and spread out from Texas sometime prior to me hearing about it, perhaps with the rise of social media, and then us folks who are out of the loop started hearing about it later. (Either through our own social media intake or through the declaration of a federal holiday.)
> This holiday is beyond stupid when you consider that the guy who freed the slaves, Abraham Lincoln, doesn't have a Federal holiday where one gets the day off.
Don't see why we can't have both.
This is beyond stupid.
Wikipedia is reliable enough to lookup what Juneteenth is, if you were really curious and not just complaining about the name.
I thought it was a neologism until I looked it up. Turns out, I'm just white.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juneteenth
> on June 19, 1866… "Jubilee Day"
> The Black community began using the word Juneteenth for Jubilee Day early in the 1890s.
As far as I know most people consider Emancipation Day the day that the Emancipation Proclamation was signed into law in 1863, whereas Juneteenth marks the day 2.5 years later that the last known enslaved people were freed from the people who decided to just not tell them about the law.
Nope, just the last in the Confederate States; the last Union chattel slaves (e.g., in Delaware) were freed by operation of law a few months later with the ratification of the 13th Amendment.
(And that's not even discussing penal slavery allowed under the 13th Amendment.)
To expand on this, knowingbetter did an in-depth video on this topic[0]. The salient bit is that penal slavery was ended in 1941-1942 by Roosevelt, so that the Japanese couldn't use it as war propaganda against the US.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA
General Order No. 3 - June 19, 1865
Thirteenth Amendment - December 6, 1865
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Order_No._3#Misconcept...
Text:
A common misconception holds that the Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves in the United States, or that the General Order No. 3 on June 19, 1865, marked the end of slavery in the United States. In fact, the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified and proclaimed in December 1865, was the article that made slavery illegal in the United States nationwide, not the Emancipation Proclamation.[6][7][8][9]
Another common misconception is that it took over two years for news of the Emancipation Proclamation to reach Texas, and that slaves did not know they had already been freed by it. In fact, news of the Proclamation had reached Texas long before 1865, and many slaves knew about Lincoln's order emancipating them, but they had not been freed since the Union army had yet to reach Texas to enforce the Proclamation. Only after the arrival of the Union army and General Order No. 3 was the Proclamation widely enforced in Texas.
Regardless, people have been calling it Juneteenth for over a hundred years, it was made a national holiday as Juneteenth, I'm gonna keep calling it that.
It may have encouraged some slaves in the Confederacy to flee, if they found out about it.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
You may be surprised to learn that, coincidentally, America has more people in prison than anywhere else.
Kind of makes sense to me.
source: been there, done that
Some do, some don't. "Black Americans in Coastal California" aren't a homogenous group, and this varies a lot by things like family geographic history, socioeconomic status, and a variety of other factors.
Source: Also been there, also done that.
Do you mean that you're slave descended black americans, and, in the case of HN User mistrial9, therefore speak for most of the slave descended black americans in coastal California?
Or do you guys mean that you celebrate Juneteenth. Thus, "been there, done that"?
The former I would challenge you on, despite obviously not being "black american coastal Californian?". The latter I would never challenge you on as that's your business.
Black AF takes place in California and the main character had a huge celebration with his entire extended family before it was even a federal holiday.
I agree lack of familiarity isn't because it's "unreal"---we invent words all the time, but I agree with OP that we could have come up with a better name. I bet if you I were to walk down the street here and ask 10 people what Juneteenth is only 1 would be able to do better than: "something to do with freeing the slaves".
It's been called Juneteenth for more than a century, and has been a state holiday for almost half a century.
Wouldn't it be even more ridiculous if the US federal government took an existing celebration and renamed it?
Regardless of its history I venture that 95% of the population hadn’t heard the word before 2020, so it’s not like it was in the public consciousness.
You’re right though, even if almost joined knew about it, it _did_ have a name and so def tough to change it.
Picturing a frappe and cappuccino gives you a sense for what a Frappuccino _is_. Picturing june and thirteenth/nineteenth only gives you sense for _when_ it is.
In only contend a better name would be one where the name suggests something about the content to someone hearing it for the first time.
Heck, Juneteenth is a better name, since it is not literally month+day.
They don’t even give you a sense for _when_ they are. Or, more accurately, they give you the _wrong_ sense for when they are by name alone.
>I bet if you I were to walk down the street here and ask 10 people what Juneteenth is only 1 would be able to do better than: "something to do with freeing the slaves".
And lots of people think Cinco de Mayo is Mexico's Independence Day, doesn't make the holiday any less valid. It's just an issue of education.
Eventually we’ll all know what it is, but that eventually would be sooner with a better name.
Do you have some basis for thinking this? I rather suspect the reason White Americans don't know about it has more to do with the fact that it celebrates Black American history and culture, which is just not that popular among White Americans. (Of course there are exceptions, but the point is they're exceptions.) I seriously doubt that the name is the problem. The problem is that relatively few people are interested.
That shouldn't be considered a naming failure. It's an education failure.
Easy names require less “education” than hard names.
And as an aside, I was curious about Festivus. Apparently it's Latin for "excellent, jovial, lively."
The writer of this episode based it on something from his family that his father did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oeu2cVABHg
I'm also going to my local Juneteenth events (in Oakland).. that said, I did have to look it up a few years ago.
EDIT: Yeah, downvote me, I replied to the wrong sub-thread post. Made more sense w/r/t resistance to Juneteenth naming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzPBaC6VPuU
You must be some sort of communist! There's a Trucktober question on the naturalization test, right before the one about Thanksgiving.
So your anecdote isn't useful. Kind of the opposite.
I mean won't every nation have its own history and important days? And it seems to me that those days in every nation will be different. I'd even wager very few of us, (far less than 1%), know what those important days are called in other nations.
Juneteenth is in that context as artificial a holiday as Kwanza. I would imagine most other southern states have similar breaks with the Juneteenth holiday, in that it doesn’t represent the historical reality of their community.
- At least one local bank website I've gone to today has a banner saying it is closed and uses the word "Juneteenth."
This seems to be reasonable enough to consider it a real word.
Additionally, the term "Emancipation Day" is inaccurate (and therefore obfuscatory) because slavery is still legal and constitutional if you are convicted of a crime. Emancipation doesn't accurately describe the current state unless this is no longer true. I'm going by this dictionary definition of "emancipation": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/emancipation
"Since 2018, about 575 companies and more than 100 public agencies in Alabama have used incarcerated people as landscapers, janitors, drivers, metal fabricators and fast-food workers, the lawsuit states, reaping an annual benefit of $450 million."
The 13th amendment specifically carves out an exception to allow prisoners to be enslaved. They aren't just using political rhetoric: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_exception_clause
You know in movies and cartoons and stuff when you'd see like, a whole bunch of prisoners in striped pajamas, chained together breaking rocks or digging ditches or whatever? Those are depictions of an enslaved workforce.
That being said, I don't doubt that the american prison systems has severe problems, for example the one raised in the other answer to my previous comment.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, *except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted*, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction
The plain reading of that text is that slavery remains a permitted punishment in the US.
Right after the civil war,
1. slavery became illegal, except as punishment for a crime
2. a ton of vague laws sprung up, like "malicious mischief". Look up "Jim Crow" or "black codes" to get a sense of these.
3. States started "convict-leasing" out prisoners as a source of income, often right back to the plantations that slaves were liberated from before. The convicted were not paid for this labor.
Additional context: Virginia Supreme Court rules that inmates are slaves to the state in 1871: https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/slaves-s... Virginia held the capitol of the Confederacy - the states that tried to leave the USA to retain their slaves.
I forget why the crime exception was added to the 13th amendment, but I assume it was to make it more palatable to the states that still wanted slaves
The difference is so slight as to be meaningless.
We Americans don't like doing that either, because it makes us uncomfortable.
>Forced labor for criminals isn't the same as being a slave. They are not owned by the state.
I'm having trouble understanding how it's different. They are held by the state, forced to work, are not free to leave, and we have a bit of a history...
Yeah, this is how things like freedom of expression and free speech clauses to the constitution work, they prohibit imprisoning ("or worse") people for displaying symbols of their preference, just because you don't like them, even if they're racist, as long as they're not actually committing violence against others.
Does your "or worse" refer to torturing people for these things perhaps? Congratulations, you're about as shitty as any garden variety authoritarian, racist or not.
We have a president doing his best to winnow down the 1st amendment against his particular brand of dislike, and on the other hand idiocies like what you demand doing it from another end. In both cases, emotionally claiming that what they want to restrict is "dangerous".
>If a house divided will inevitably fall, then certainly, a house that tolerates people advocating destruction of the house will also fall.
If your notion of a house divided means anyone not sharing your worldview then being imprisoned ("or worse"), it's you, or people like you who are really the problem in a country where it's exactly the kind of authoritarian bullshit you vomit that has been largely rejected by centuries of constitutional protections.
Germans also understand Nazis better than the US and they decided their democracy doesn't need it.
In essence, these laws don't really "help" anyhow in terms of stopping any serious movement toward extremism, while on the other hand sometimes selectively being used to censor in completely nonsensical ways.
Also worth noting, historically, it was exactly a fear of letting deeply hated ideological enemies of the country's conservative elements that caused the Weimar conservatives to make justifications for censoring ideologically opposed viewpoints and "protecting the nation" against their definition of treason through laws that created loopholes for authoritarian control. This very same perceived need led them to an alliance with the Nazis and the formation of the Hitler cabinet of 1933, after which the much more extreme Hitler used the same legal loopholes -so easily exploitable by serious authoritarians- to completely destroy the Weimar Republic and all of its existing political, social and individual freedoms.
The so-called paradox of tolerance is bullshit. It was specifically intolerance and legal mechanisms for its expression against supposedly extreme viewpoints, that destroyed Weimar Germany and led to Nazi Germany. I have yet to see a country where too much free expression leads to more repression. The exact opposite is the case everywhere you look. Politicians and ideologues establish "reasonable" limits on extremist speech and later expand those ever more censoriously as they redefine extremism or treason to include anything that supposedly divides the nation, ie: goes against their views of a unified political system.
No, "worse" meant capital punishment (the universal punishment for that crime). The only good traitor is a dead traitor. Don't betray your country. Don't fly the flags of its enemies. I am fine with a moderate punishment (1-2 years in prison), I just expected society to treat it with the seriousness it deserves.
If you conspire to kill someone or rob a bank, that's a conspiracy charge. if you run around dressed and armed like a militia and wearing confederate flags, threatening race wars, then it's free speech. that makes no sense.
This isn't an unpopular sentiment outside the US as you think. I like germany's approach to the problem. the punishment isn't severe but just enough. Try the nazi salute in germany or flying the nazi flag and you'll see what happens.
Your argument is a logical fallacy (slipperly slope). No, I am not suggesting arbitrary banning of arbitrary symbols and flags I dislike, there is no slippery slope. If an entity is declared an enemy of the united states by the democratically elected government of the united states, then you don't get to fly its flags on american soil without consequence. You don't get to fly ISIS or al-qaeda flags just the same as confederate and nazi flags. I am not against flying random KKK or white supremacist flags (well I am, I just don't think that should be illegal). Displaying symbols or making speech in advocacy of a declared enemy of your country shouldn't be legal.
If the checks and balances of government allow Trump to declare an entity enemy of the state then yeah, you can't fly their flags either. That's how democracy works, don't elect people who are not trustworthy. The constitution is not a religion and freedom of speech means nothing without a stable country to administer it.
Being intolerant to some speech is necessary for the preservation of free speech. Free speech doesn't mean you get to say anything without consequence (can't yell fire in a crowd, I'd say rebellion is worse than that!).
Treason and rebellion is worse than mass murder! that's our disconnect. you see it as an opinion, I see it as something so horrific that I wouldn't be all that upset if the person's precious life (and even in case of murder I don't support capital punishment, except for extreme cases) was taken from them. War and the death of millions of innocents is what I equate treason and rebellion with, and not just death but so much human suffering that lasts decades (see the misery of post-civil-war reconstruction!).
Do that and you can guarantee that it’ll be used against you. I abhor people who fly those flags, I’ll personally stomp their faces, but the government shouldn’t be allowed to stop them or else your run into the issue of what treasonous speech is. I firmly believe the people (society in general) should hold all of the power when it comes to policing speech.
Either you have faith in democracy or you don't.
That's not a slippery slope, the admin is on the record saying that socialists are their enemies. I don't want to give them the power to go after anyone who might be a socialist. Especially when they are carting people off to death camps in foreign countries.
>-Content featuring the sexual exploitation of children
What?
Edit: I see the parent has been flagged and removed, so I assume it was nothing
I cannot make assertions about the show, only that I am passingly familiar with the internet's larger distaste for the show based on allegations of exploitation of minors.