Source: Houston Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images / Getty
Welp, another Juneteenth has come and gone, and, as usual, Black people across the country appropriately celebrated the festivities commemorating our emancipation, while Candace Owens and other white conservatives (yes, you read that correctly) honored the holiday by taking cheap swipes at Democrats, crediting America for ending slavery and just generally making the day about themselves and their politics.
Owens spent the day doing what she’s done on Juneteenth for the last few years, which is talk about the holiday obsessively because it’s so very important to her for everyone to know she feels about Juneteenth the way she feels about disabled people getting modeling jobs.
The edgeless Klan-whisperer called Juneteenth “ghetto” likely because it’s a holiday for Black people and because she’s a self-loathing, anti-Black weirdo who knows her audience is full of people who are always looking for N-word alternatives to stock up in their dog whistle lexicons. She also called it “made up” as if all holidays aren’t made up, because conservatives appear to think all their favorite annual celebrations magically appeared after Holiday Jesus took a holy squat over America and crapped out Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, President’s Day and the Fourth of July.
Owens also appears to be under the impression that Juneteenth, a holiday that had been recognized by Black Americans for decades, is a creation by Democrats who apparently elected President Joe Biden as its official Santa Claus.
But enough about white America’s favorite MAGA mammy. Let’s move on to Republican senator and insurrection cheerleader Josh Hawley, who tweeted that Juneteenth was “a good day to remember: Christianity is the faith and America is the place slavery came to die.”
Hawley, of course, posted this despite the fact that Christianity was weaponized to justify slavery and the fact that the U.S. was literally one of the last countries to abolish slavery. So, it isn’t so much that “America is the place where slavery came to die,” as much as America is the place where slavery came to thrive for roughly 250 years then eventually fizzle out after America saw what everyone else was doing and decided to follow suit lest it loses its spot at the popular table.
Anyway, this brings me to who I’m really here to talk about: The Republican from Texas who called into C-SPAN’s Juneteenth program to suggest Black people owe white people a “thank you” for ending slavery.
From Newsweek:
“I haven’t heard any Black person say thank you to the over 300,000 white men who died to free those Black slaves,” a man who called himself Dave said during Monday’s call-in program.
More than 592,000 people died in the American Civil War, including 334,680 Union soldiers, who fought for the abolition of slavery, according to the National Park Service. The Union Army included over 2.4 million white soldiers and more than 178,000 African American soldiers.
Dave said he had “not heard one white Democrat apologize for slavery” and that his ancestors, who were from Scotland and Ireland, “never owned slaves.”
In just a couple of sentences, Dave demonstrated in full conservatives’ skewed and delusional perception of American history and the decidedly Caucasian lens they view it through.
What do Black people owe Civil War veterans, or America in general, a “thank you” for?
If someone takes a dump on your lawn and continues to do so for two and a half centuries, you don’t owe them gratitude for eventually coming through with a pooper scooper.
Also, I’m not sure why Republicans believe it’s relevant that Democrats were largely responsible for slavery when it doesn’t seem to be relevant to them that the South (currently red-state America) is largely where slavery took place and where the preservation of the institution was relentlessly fought for. Dave is a white man from Texas, which means his people, whether they owned slaves or not, existed in an American (and world) culture where Black people being owned as property and/or confined to second-class citizenship was normalized.
That was the way of life for white people (especially) in the American South (again, currently red-state America). Not the way of the Democrat. Not the way of the liberal. Not the way of the slave owner specifically. We’re talking about white Confederate culture, which is currently celebrated and vehemently defended by—you guessed it—Republican conservatives.
But sure—thanks, or whatever.
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