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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37978 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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That first year Juneteenth was a federal holiday, it was the exact same day as Father's Day. It's like the feds were daring us to notice.

Yes, the feds purposefully enforced the emancipation proclamation on June 19th in order to overlap with father's day once a decade.

Or, perhaps they purposefully triggered the summer of love because the overlap was coming up.

Why celebrate the occupation and not the declaration? 4th of July celebrates a purely formal act, and not when the British lost control of anything.

It was originally a local holiday on the gulf coast in Texas, which seems eminently reasonable. Why pick this one and not one of what I’m sure are a dozen other local African American holidays I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem like an unreasonable arbitrary decision to make.

It seems that it was initially a niche holiday in certain parts of Texas, so maybe that's why they cared about the emancipation of Texas.

I agree with this criticism, but it’s worth noting that the declaration was in December, which is already pretty holiday-heavy, and which doesn’t have the best weather in most of the country. Whereas most people would welcome an extra day off in June, which didn’t previously have any federal holidays.

Juneteenth doesn’t celebrate the emancipation proclamation. It celebrates occupying troops taking possession of Galveston.

It celebrates the enforcement of the proclamation, as I said.

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