A couple of years ago, now, I commented on the federal holiday marked today: Juneteenth, the anniversary of the promulgation of the Emancipation Procalamation in Texas and the putative formal end to the institution of chattel slavery in the United States. (I know that the qualifiers in that definition are doing a lot of lifting.) In those comments, I note the ways in which the day’s observance is fraught for me, and, in truth, most of those ways still obtain (although today did not occasion a specific closing of my office; outside of tax season, I don’t generally operate on Fridays, anyway). There is still much the Proclamation ought to have addressed that it did not, or not fully; there is still much subsequent laws ought to have addressed that they have not, or not fully; I still benefit from systems of inequality in which I am enmeshed and from which I see no means of extricating myself that would do anybody any good; and I am and damned well should be uncomfortable, at a minimum, about all of those.

I am, as I have noted on many occasions, both within and without this webspace, generally ill at ease with celebration and observance. This is not because I do not think things should be celebrated or memorialized; there are many things that should. And it is not because I was not raised to feel such unease; the reverse is very much true, and my family still expresses confusion that I don’t really “get into the spirit of things.” They accept or tolerate it, in no small part because I am apt to remove myself from goings-on, but it still…sticks. (Before you think something like “Well, just go along with it and fake it,” these are people who know my tells, and after decades of doing one thing, a reversal would stand out; I can fake it, maybe, but there’s no “’til I make it” for this.) So it’s not necessarily about today’s observance, in particular, although there are certainly some things particular to this observance that prompt me towards unease about it–again, not because it’s not worth observing, but because I recognize myself as a poor observer for it, even as I acknowledge I would be remiss to make no comment upon it at all.

In that spirit, that tension between the rightness and goodness of observing and the knowledge of my insufficiency to the same, the following: For those for whom Juneteenth is meant, may there be joy in it, and may those who still decry its observance have of the day exactly what they deserve of it!

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