On the second annual Juneteenth federal holiday, it is worth reinforcing that this can and should be a patriotic celebration for all Americans. It’s a celebration for all Americans, in ways we may not expect.
The actual end of slavery marked the ejection of an existential sin from America. What that means is worth laying out. The Thirteenth Amendment had made slavery officially un-American. The Civil War had eradicated the Confederate States of America, with its repudiation of the Declaration’s founding truth that “all Men are created equal.” Conversely, the end of slavery was hardly the end of race-based oppression of Black persons. But on Juneteenth the actual ownership of slaves disappeared from American life, and everybody knew it.
Slavery was a glaring contradiction, in theory and practice, to the Declaration of Independence’s founding creed. America conceived itself as a “People” who held certain truths to be self-evident. Of course no abstract expression such as this creed – of unalienable rights equally endowed in all – ever comes completely to life. And the flesh of American society in 1776 still lived far short of the truths embraced by the Continental Congress. Slavery was not abnormal in the world where the colonists had come from, while racism seemed, in the day, a natural extension of ethnically-defined identity. The stain on America’s legitimacy was real, but masked in a world where old norms, including ethnic identity and government for rulers’ vested interests, still held some sway. Yet the value of a creed lies in the direction it sets for its holders, and slavery contravened that guidance. With its end, so did that self-contradiction of our own founding.
In one sense, Juneteenth marks only a re-casting of this self-contradiction, from slavery into racism. And in that sense the stain remains. But it did go through a progression. Legal reduction of persons to property was replaced by exclusion of those same persons from rights and benefits of citizenship. These new exclusions had to be imposed under cover of legal subterfuge, tolerated as resentment-fueled interests outlasted reformers’ moral commitment. Racism continued to contradict our founding creed, in legal forms that lasted another century, and in practices that still persist. But the eradication of slavery did signify progress in our creed.
Some call slavery, and its legacy of racism, America’s original sin. But that gives racism too much credit. Original sin is something, like the sexual conception of persons, that you can only escape by ceasing to exist. You have to accept it as part of yourself and somehow reconcile that with your conscience. America the nation came into being in an assertion of universal rights. Slavery was an existential sin because it belied our creed. But was not an original sin. America has no need to accept slavery or racism as an unavoidable part of our national self. We cannot, and must not, reconcile with it as people do with their biological parentage. We do need to reconcile our conscience with the fact that the practices existed or, in the case of racism, still exist here. But our founding creed, our national DNA, excludes them from American-ness and calls for their eradication. Slavery was indeed eradicated, and racism can be too. All of America gains in the affirmation of the tenets on which we conceived ourselves a nation.
But Juneteenth is about even more than eradication, more than any lifting of restraints. The Declaration’s creed is a liberation of all persons from an ancient “reality,” that rulers ruled by divine authority and the rest of humanity coped. Now, government’s purpose, we said, is to secure the unalienable rights of the person. Those are the rights conferred by the Creator – divine authority really belongs to us. Our ultimate authority is to live as we choose – in rights to life, liberty, and particularly the pursuit of happiness. This liberation is hard – rule by existing authority still feels normal to most of the world and many still take happiness simply from surviving with a little psychic comfort. But America conceived a nation of people who would govern themselves without rulers and invent themselves without dogmas. This is harder than anyone could have imagined. With all the ordained, received Truths gone, every individual has to make it all up from scratch. Yes, our communities and our churches can guide us, but now we get to choose whether to stay with them or strike out “on my own.” And if we have the choice, then even to stay is to choose. In this unavoidable burden of choice, every American takes part in a truly revolutionary experiment. In this experiment our best resolve will come from seeing each other mount our efforts, sympathizing with each others’ challenges, and affirming together that this experiment, and my enterprise with my own life, will work out.
Juneteenth marks not only a liberation from formal slavery. It also marks progress in America’s fidelity to our founding. In that progress we grow as a nation, a nation of persons working to make freedom work. Not everyone has the special reason that Black persons do to mark Juneteenth. But every American can celebrate anyone’s freedom. The whole nation should observe this holiday with patriotic pride.
Common Conviction 