What’s wrong with the commercialisation of Juneteenth?

Tariq Nasheed argued that the government’s decision to mark ‘Juneteenth’ as a holiday at all was simply their way of ‘throwing [us] a bone’, giving ‘black folks a holiday’ rather than doing anything proactive to honour African-American culture and the history of emancipation.

The commercialisation of Juneteenth is uncomfortable – it’s in bad taste. But it’s also dangerous. Like the act of creating a federal holiday, Juneteenth’s co-option by the American market is a means of veiling the truth.

Law makers and country-leaders can pat themselves on the back – ‘a job well done’. Turning the history of slavery into paper plates and limited-edition ice-cream, sweet cartoons of interlocked black and brown hands, reduces the long, painful, complicated journey of African-American people into a comfortably consumable commodity.

It also implies that journey is over. That Black people in the US have reached a place of freedom and equality. As we know, this is not true.

Any celebration of emancipation that comes from outside of the emancipated community shifts the narrative from one of remembrance and resilience to one of self-aggrandizement.

Juneteenth commemorates the US abolition of slavery under President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, belatedly announced by a Union army general in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865.

While a small group of white Americans may have pushed for the abolishment of slavery, behind them were millions of Black people who had been battling that same fight for decades – and a sea of white people who had pushed them back.

Not to mention, the only reason emancipation can be celebrated in the first place is because white people created the need for it at all. A white, capitalist, governmental co-option of Juneteenth is – like every federal celebration of abolition – a means of feeding white guilt, distracting from the truth of our involvement in the (continued) suffering of African Americans.

Does the US government, the white population of America, believe the tacky co-option of Juneteenth can distract from the facts? That both of these bodies of people upheld the enslavement of Black people for centuries?

The holiday was created because it could give African American’s a chance to right the wrongs of a censored history. To tell the stories of the America’s past from the ‘point of view of the oppressed’ rather than the oppressor.

But Juneteenth’s polyester wrapped feature in the aisles of Walmart and other US supermarkets demonstrates that history can always be neatly packaged and made consumable for the masses.

This is a sugar coating that undermines the suffering, struggle, and triumph of African Americans, so that a wider public may feel more comfortable swallowing a pill as bitter as their country’s own role in shaping – and denying – this past.