Independence Day, Replaced

One of President Biden’s signature achievements in his first six months in office has been to create a new public holiday, Juneteenth National Independence Day, in commemoration of the very last days of American slavery. This new federal holiday, the first since Martin Luther King Day was created in 1983, pushes us to consider the significance of symbols in political regimes.

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Public holidays are an essential part of nationhood in that they bind a people to a common heritage. In calling a people to remember their past, holidays also shape their future—they operate, as Burke described political societies more broadly, as “a partnership…between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” In other words, public holidays, by looking “backward to [our] ancestors,” enable us to “look forward to [our] posterity.”

But as nations change, their stories change, and the holidays change accordingly.  New holidays are created and old ones are discarded, marking regime shifts. {snip}

This is the context in which we must understand Juneteenth National Independence Day. Despite the obvious virtues of Juneteenth Day as a private celebration of freedom, we should be more skeptical about the federal codification of that celebratory event. Three background conditions surrounding the passage of Juneteenth National Independence Day make it more akin to a regime shift than a mere celebration of freedom.

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Juneteenth National Independence Day neither memorializes a national figure nor honors a national practice. {snip}

President Biden was thus explicitly normative in his Juneteenth Proclamation: “Juneteenth is a day that should be recognized by all Americans.” It is impossible to imagine this prescriptive statement being made about any other event on the public calendar because previous federal acts codifying holidays acknowledged rather than created social practices.

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Indeed, Juneteenth National Independence Day is unique in calling Americans to celebrate an event that many did not even know existed until the federal law was passed. In fact, a Gallup poll, conducted less than one month before the creation of Juneteenth National Independence Day, found about one-third of Americans knew “nothing at all” about Juneteenth, and another one-third knew only “a little bit.”

Framed in this light, Juneteenth National Independence Day does not appear to be a call to participate together in the celebration of freedom. Rather, it looks more like a call for one part of the nation to be ruled by another.

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We must understand this prescriptive feature of Juneteenth National Independence Day in light of the social movement that generated the federal act—namely, the “woke” movement led by Black Lives Matter. Before 2019, the only state to recognize Juneteenth as a public holiday was the state the historic event actually involved—Texas—which has formally recognized it as an optional state holiday since 1979.  In 2019, however, in the wake of the rising Black Lives Matter movement, Pennsylvania made Juneteenth a state holiday. And after the 2020 race riots engulfed many American cities, several states followed Pennsylvania’s lead.

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The legal language surrounding the adoption of the public holiday makes clear that this is about race relations in the 21st century, not emancipation from slavery in the 19th century. Indeed, Republican Pennsylvania state representative Sue Helms, in proposing the state bill, explains that the purpose of the holiday is “to highlight education and achievement in the African-American community.” New York similarly proclaims that this public holiday is designed to “celebrate[] Black and African American freedom and achievements.” Virginia likewise declares that the holiday is designed “to recognize the significant roles and many contributions of African Americans to the Commonwealth and the nation.”

President Biden’s language in his Juneteenth Proclamation is even more striking in that it is transparently future-oriented: “Juneteenth not only commemorates the past. It calls us to action today.” Biden thus urges us to use Juneteenth as an inspiration to “recommit ourselves to the work of equity, equality, and justice,” because, you guessed it, “there is still more work to do.”

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As a result of how Juneteenth National Independence Day was created, the average citizen may not even know what historic event the new holiday celebrates, but he almost certainly knows that he has a day off work because of George Floyd.

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The creation of Juneteenth National Independence Day means that the Fourth of July and the Declaration’s emphasis on self-governance will decreasingly represent the story of the American people, for we will have a new story, based on a very different moral order.