Well, I suppose there are worse things to celebrate than freedom, but I see this "Juneteenth" holiday as just another manifestation of the divisiveness that is plaguing America. Bear in mind that Juneteenth is the ONLY federal holiday that is limited to one particular ethnicity.
Of course, we can celebrate along with them over the fact that they are no longer held in bondage--but then why not include (say) the Chinese, whose suffering particularly on America's West Coast from the mid-19th Century to the early 20th was in many respects equal to, and in many cases, exceeding that of the African-American ethnicity in this country. Slaves represented an outlay of capital--in many cases a substantial one--but for many of the Chinese their "employers" paid nothing to the workers, paying instead a daily pittance to the procurers who brought them over here, many against their will, to serve essentially as slaves to people who had no interesting in protecting an investment at all, resulting in human abuse that in many cases exceeded that of the Black slaves in the antebellum South. Or how about the Irish, who were literally untermenschen in many parts of america long before 1930s Germany ever popularized the concept. Or how about the mentally handicapped, who before our "enlightened" time in America were all too often treated about the same as cattle; rounded up and institutionalized where very often they were forced to work for the profit of those who were essentially nothing more than slavemasters, and whose treatment very often was barbaric: I know of cases where such people, if too vocal for their masters' taste, had their vocal chords torn out, and where "corrective discipline" if they were lucky was to be sprayed with ice-cold water from hoses, but which was all too often a straight jacket and a totally dark room for hours--sometimes days. Or how about society's rejects; the orphaned children of the poor and and the penniless, when the idea of "treatment" was to be institutionalized behind high fences and stone walls and put into the care of "house parents" (there were other terms too) who very often drove them like cattle, forcing them to work for whatever reason, and where death was often just termed "failure to thrive" but what was later discovered to be just the lack of positive human contact--just a hug or two, that was in all too many cases not forthcoming even when they were dying. Don't believe me? Then google Minnesota State School - Owatonna, where I used to live. It used to be Minneota's orphanage, but it is a museum now, and one of the "exhibits" is the children's cemetery where row upon row of little white crosses bear witness to those kids who were just not strong enough to survive the cruelty and the oppression.
Sure. Let's celebrate freedom. But don't continue to divide America by doing it.
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