Now, mainstream media would have us believe that this was some sort of "thing" prior to BLM, instead of a bunch of scared people trying to pander to that organisation. Virtue signalling costs nothing, but feels really good.
So, take a relatively obscure celebration and turn it into a "something". You weren't crazy if you were wondering why you had never heard of it before 2020. And you were among a very small group of people if you DID know about this prior to then. But there's this little truth bomb hidden in all the bullshit about Juneteenth:
The fuel behind the amplification of the Juneteenth signal was not simply historical reflection but the uprisings that followed the killing of George Floyd, and perhaps the pandemic.Very few people of all ethnicities gave a shit about Juneteenth prior to that date. I seriously doubt they would have given a rat's ass about it afterward either. The NPR clip mentioned in the screen cap pretty much sums the situation up. More amusingly, NPR interviews Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, who happens to have been born in Ghana.
Those with a familiarity of the triangular trade will know it as home to the Ashanti Empire, which was the largest slaveowning and slave trading state during the Atlantic slave trade and is found in the territory that is today's Ghana.
Somehow, I think that Ms. Opoku-Agyeman's opinion on Juneteenth is probably not the best one to have taken. I could be even meaner as to who NPR could have chosen to interview, but he's dead. Actually, there were a lot of slave traders out there besides the one I was thinking about.
But virtue signalling is free!
And when it comes to race everything is truly black and white in the US. Not the nuance needed for a reasoned discussion of this topic.
I find it amusing that Rolling Stone is talking about a Neo-Nazi group who are Terrified Nobody Will Care About Their Juneteenth Protest. Personally, I would ignore it and we'll see it go the way of Kwanzaa if I were in their shoes. They aren't doing their cause much good by attracting more attention to all this.
Or Odunde.
Personally, I would have picked Odunde if we want to go for obscure African-American festivals since it probably has more of a following than Juneteenth. I mean, you may as well go all out if you are going to virtue signalling.
I know that Juneteenth would have passed me by had it not been a call to my bank over a declined charge where I was greeted by a recording that the institution would be closed because of Juneteenth.
I'm surprised people care, but it is a day off from work.
And I won't quote a certain DC shock jock no matter how germane that might be to the discussion... On the other hand, the above clip is much better than that shock jock's statement ever was for showing racism.
Also NPR chose to take the opinion of someone from hails from a nation that was one of the worst offenders in the slave trade about WHY we should be concerned about Juneteenth. Never mind all talk of slavery tends to focus on white people. But not all white people were slaveowners. And that leaves out the abolitionists who were white and put their lives on the line to free slaves. John Brown mean anything to you?
You can't blame everyone for the actions of a small group, otherwise these black people need to get off their high horse since they were complicit in the ethnic cleansing of the native North Americans courtesy of the Buffalo Soldiers, or the blacks who were in the US Army after the Civil War. The ones who found they could get ahead by going west and fighting the Native Americans.
But we have the the Google Trends data which shows most people aren't too concerned. I'm just tired of the pointless virtue signalling which really doesn't change anything.
--The Hill--Juneteenth at year two marked by commercial, political challenges