Juneteenth: An Uncelebrated Holiday
The Bougie Aunt | Published 12:00 a.m. E.T. June 19, 2020
The year is 1863, you are an African-American slave, and President Abraham Lincoln just issued the Emancipation Proclamation. You are ecstatic because that automatically means you and your other slave companions are all released from the bonds of slavery, right? No, you are completely wrong. But I can reason why, as the Emancipation Proclamation is often misunderstood, and consequently, taught wrong in schools.
Since the Eurocentric narrative shapes the United States’s history of slavery to seem like a linear path where the starting point is the Transatlantic Slave Trade and cuts off immediately after Martin Luther King Jr. had his Kumbaya moment (that has increasingly become more whitewashed as the years pass), the...