This is not specifically my holiday except that, as an American, I celebrate the freedom of all Americans. As an American I celebrate every incremental move my country has taken toward the ideals it signed on to when it declared its wish to its own country.
But every time I think about Juneteenth I marvel in gratitude at the optimism, the generosity of spirit, the patriotism with which the community rooted in former enslavement observes it.
The story of the “news”—ahem—coming to enslaved people in Texas two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation is a glass half full and half empty moment. Freedom, yes, but only after their enslavers had withheld the news of their freedom and extracted another two and a half years of unpaid toil and misery from 250,000 people. It would be easy to mark the day with mourning and anger. But no. There is celebration. And there is what I see as a marvel of generosity and patriotism.
The soaring words that Jefferson wrote, despite the huge flaws of his own history, those words we pay lip service to are words the formerly enslaved and their descendants have believed. And held their country to.
Maybe Juneteenth celebrates exactly that, the highest ideals of those who founded the country and those who have, over the years, believed in those ideals and worked to move us closer to realizing them. And so it is a holiday for all of us, whatever our family’s story. At a moment when those lofty goals seem ever farther out of reach, as we observe the second year of the federal holiday 157 years after the original day of freedom, maybe Juneteenth is just what we all need.