Juneteenth as a Middle-Aged White Guy
Juneteenth as a Middle-Aged White Guy
A great day for America.
Reminder: No Triad tomorrow and Friday. See you on Monday.
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.
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.