The Half-Assed History of 'Juneteenth'
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From Bacon’s Rebellion to modern fast fashion: The strategic amnesia about unabolished slavery behind America’s newest holiday.
It’s impossible to morally argue in favor of one of the ugliest institutions in human history. Anti-slavery holidays like the U.S.’s Juneteenth exist in other countries, too, like Emancipation Day in Canada (I didn’t even know we had one! August 1st), elevated into federal holiday status a few weeks after Biden wielded the pen against the whip. Monkey see monkey do, eh? Mexico’s El Nacimiento de los Negros (shouldn’t that be Personas de Color?) while not a federal holiday, celebrates the Black Seminoles who fled to Mexico for freedom, after having fled their plantation masters for the tribe who welcomed the enemies of their enemies. The June 19th date was chosen to coincide with their fellow slaves’ emancipation in last-holdout Galveston, Texas.
Slavery was abolished in Mexico decades before the U.S. or Canada.
Celebrating the end of slavery isn’t much different from V-E or V-J Day feting the end of the world’s last and ugliest world war. Good-bye, and don’t the the door hitcha inna ass on the way out! But I’ve never embraced Juneteenth myself (I’m a Bad Liberal!) for a few reasons, mostly because it was birthed at Peak Woke in America. It strongly resembles just another dumbass progressive holiday giving self-hating white progressives another virtue-signalling moment, and overprivileged black activists another reason to piss and moan about how ‘marginalized’ they are when they should be home working with their career coach to optimize their resume for their forthcoming Goldman Sachs interview.
Juneteenth is further unpalatable for its focus on one specific type of slavery (plantation). It ignores the reality of how prosperous the transatlantic slave trade was not just for white buyers, but also for African entrepreneurs themselves.
And, if we’re being honest, we haven’t abolished slavery in America so much as transmogrified it.
Slavery today
Jeffrey Epstein epitomizes modern human slavery, even as he was only a tiny sliver of it. Human and sex trafficking aren’t just for billionaires; modern slaves are affordable and available for everyone. Human slavery is likely happening right in your very neighborhood. Maybe children are being forced to do sexual things in front of the camera in their father’s basement. Or they work in ‘massage parlors’. Prostitutes (not ‘sex workers’) are likely sex-trafficked. Hotels and motels famously provide safe havens for trafficking girls and women (and sometimes boys and young men too). You may live in a ‘nice’ neighborhood but don’t be so sure everyone who lives there is ‘nice’.
‘Sex work’ and ‘human trafficking’ are prettier term that blankets the truth: It’s human slavery.
Half of human trafficking involves hard labor. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, forced vs sexual labor globally is about fifty-fifty—38.7% sexual and 38.8% forced labor. Today’s slaves work in fields (plantations!), on fishing boats, and the hospitality industry. Around ten percent are forced to engage in criminal behavior—purse snatching, pickpocketing, begging and drug selling. Traffickers can be strangers or members of the family.
The Global Slavery Index (2023) estimates that 50 million people are living in modern slavery on any given day.
The International Labor Organization’s reports on forced labor estimated the global profits at $150B in their 2014 report, and by 2024, $236B.
We are all swimming in human slavery while we pat our own backs celebrating an early version we abolished a century and a half ago.
“Hey baby! Wanna buy a slave?”
Juneteenth fails to address who enabled African slavery by happily selling their countrymen enemies off to their new melanin-challenged market.
In some parts of Africa, they’ve never stopped.
Today, there are African countries where you can buy, sell, trade, and own other human beings. The slaves are multiracial. The buyers and traders are multiracial. It’s illegal everywhere but unenforced where there’s weak government, and officials who can make a buck. Some job seekers are forced to work in the Gulf States for wealthy Arabs.
Let’s call out the biggest miscreants perpetuating human slavery even today: Eritrea, Mauritania, South Sudan, the Republic of the Congo, and Nigeria.
All located on one big top-heavy continent.
There’s still a huge global market for slaves while we pretend it’s finit. The irony being, not even in our own neighborhoods.
The legacy of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676)
Juneteenth tastes uncomfortably of self-righteous grievance and white self-aggrandizement.
As an ‘antiracism’ holiday, it’s cringey to see Black Lives Matter associate themselves with it. These are the people who condemn white racism but embrace antisemitism, and ignore their own ancestors’ complicity in enslaving Africans.
My Great-Grandfather, The Nigerian Slave-Trader - The New Yorker
Many of us are tired of hearing about an institution our great-great grandparents abolished, along with the pointless ‘1619 Project’, which also ignores pouch-stuffed Africans waving goodby at the departing ships. It suggests America was founded on the concept of slavery. When actually, African slavery became popular only when Scottish and Irish indentured servants (themselves partially enslaved) kept dying of malaria in the New World—a disease Africans had developed better immunities to because they’d lived with it for thousands of years.
There was another big reason for standardizing Negro slavery: 1676’s Bacon’s Rebellion, in which a wealthy white man led a rebellion comprised of poor indentured whites and arguably ‘indentured’ Africans. United, they burned Jamestown to the ground.
This scared the elites so much that they restructured society to ensure the poor could never pull this again. They enacted a series of codes and policies that essentially invented the racial hierarchy that came to define the American slavery system.
Everyone invented slavery, not just Europeans or Americans. It was necessitated by the Agricultural Revolution when the need to farm enormous amounts of food for growing settled populations required mass labor.
It’s questionable how many of us don’t have ancestral slaves, slave owners and slave traders in our family tree. Including pre-transatlantic slave trade Europeans, who practiced chattel slavery and serfdom.
You want to play more-oppressed-than-thou? The earliest slaves we recognize were the Slavs—from whom we get the word slave—and they were the whitest whitey-whites. As were their enslavers, the Swedish Vikings and the early Russians.
At the same time that the transatlantic slave trade was ramping up, darky-dark Barbary pirates were terrorizing the European coastline, capturing and doing some terrible things to their pretty white slaves.
What’s in it for you?
Holidays like Juneteenth, Emancipation Day, El Nacimiento and others are nevertheless worthwhile: They make at least some of us pay attention to the gross injustices visited on Africans by others, but it’s disingenuous and half-assed; it doesn’t tell the entire story, and it encourages too much wallowing in a sliver of the past. We’re told by proponents of Half-Assed History that we need to focus on the economic legacy and lingering effects on black African-Americans, when in fact vast oceans of ink have already been spilled on that subject. It’s old news, especially in an era where American blacks are faring much better than they did even half a century ago. I’ve seen the progress with my 63-year-old eyes.
Africa is still Ground Zero for forced, unpaid labor.
While we’re congratulating ourselves for eliminating slavery in particular places, the spirit of Juneteenth should resolve to do more to end it today, and to rub our faces in the ugly fact that most of us are still enjoying the benefits of slave labor, even if we don’t have our own under-the-table au pair. If you buy from Shein, H&M, Christian Dior, Louis Vuitton, Coach, Kate Spade, Apple, Tesla, Nestle, Mars, or Hershey, you directly benefit from slave labor. How committed are you to ending it by not paying for crap you really don’t need?
Juneteenth can start by calling ‘trafficking’ slavery, and human traffickers what they are: Slavers.
Here’s an uncomfortable thought to sit with today: All those fruit pickers and domestics who harvest your produce and help raise children rounded up by ICE and imprisoned or deported are partially enslaved, forced by poverty and illegal status to work for substandard wages with no protections. They can be abused, including sexually, and if they want to keep their job, they should open their legs and shut their mouths. If you love those immigrants so much, are you willing to pay higher prices so they can be paid working wages?
Anyone serious about celebrating Juneteenth should ponder: How do I benefit from slavery today?
Juneteenth could make Americans aware of how much we depend on human slavery: If you love yanking it over porn, know that, “According to cases reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline in the United States, pornography was the third most common form of sex trafficking (Polaris, 2020). And in the same vein, research with current and former porn actors suggests that exploitation and human trafficking are common experiences in the pornography industry (Donenvan, 2021).” (Source: United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner report, February 2024)
Do you eat food? Forced labor packs your processed food and picks your aforementioned produce for some grocery stores.
Who built that nice condo you live in? The Obamas weren’t the only Americans who lived in a dwelling built by slaves. The construction industry depends heavily on them.
Nice nails. Did the lady who trimmed, shaped, buffed, and polished them get paid for it? I mean, after you paid your bill?
We all benefit from modern slavery. The only ones who don’t are our slaves.
Juneteenth bores me. We’ve been discussing ad nauseum the impact of human slavery on their descendants. In the U.S., the Juneteenth message is strictly controlled to keep the focus off the embarrassing factoids about African complicity, past and present. It’s why Juneteenth is more of a punchline than a genuine celebration.
I don’t want to rain on your parade, but I do want your parade to call for an end to that which you prematurely celebrate the demise of 160 years ago.
Because human slavery still sucks, even when you’re not picking cotton.
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