Juneteenth as a Middle-Aged White Guy

A great day for America.

Reminder: No Triad tomorrow and Friday. See you on Monday.

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The Empire State Building and One Vanderbilt are lit in red and green to mark Juneteenth on June 19, 2022. (Gary Hershorn/Getty Images)

1. Bubble Boy

Here is a true story: I’d never heard of Juneteenth until shortly before Joe Biden made it a national holiday.

My excuse is that I grew up in New Jersey, in the 1980s. The monuments I saw were all to Union soldiers. Racial equality was—on the part of suburban white kids, anyway—simply assumed.

I remember a camping trip to Tennessee when I was 12. We stopped in a general store which was festooned with Confederate flags and I was as shocked as if I’d stumbled into a pack of little green men walking in circles around a flying saucer. Seeing people who venerated the Confederacy and slavery wasn’t merely exotic. It was wholly, completely alien. It had never occurred to me that such people existed.

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Youth, like gravity, dilates time. When you’re young, anything that took place more than five minutes ago is pre-historic. So to the 12-year-old me, the Civil War, Aristotle, and Stonehenge all occupied roughly the same spot on the space-time continuum.

But another part of why I was so shocked to discover racism is that I had been privileged not to have been forced to notice it.