You're missing that it's a dog whistle - we should not be nice. Look at this person's adjacent comments here.
tomhow · 43m ago
> we should not be nice
It's not about being nice, but on Hacker News we operate according to guidelines and norms that have evolved over more than 15 years, which keep discussions focused on substance and prevent it from burning to the ground the way most online communities do.
Please do your part to make this place better not worse. The point you made above was a valid and valuable one, but the way you expressed it means its value is lost.
Boogie_Man · 1h ago
Someone got mad at me today because I said "we beat slavery" was I accidentally dog whistling? It's just how I thought about it. I guess "white people" did beat it but also "white people" were doing it. We kind of beat it as a country is what I meant. Idk my family wasn't even here yet but I'm just happy there isn't slavery.
SalmonSnarker · 52m ago
You are being actively obtuse here, which is understandable if perhaps you're taking almostgotcaught's comments as a direct attack on you. (which it most likely isn't)
If you looked at the adjacent comments you would immediately see a combination of "western christian values," and open pondering that "Epstein is an Israeli asset. Democrats and Republicans have loyalty to Israel." This alone is enough dog whistling for at least my neighborhood's dogs to start acting up.
Boogie_Man · 37m ago
Sorry, It wasn't a rhetorical device, it actually happened to me today. I'm not taking either "side", I thought it might explain something I didn't understand. 100% legitimately.
SalmonSnarker · 20m ago
That's fine, you don't have to apologize to me.
To put it into terms that may hit closer to home:
Remember Vatican 2? you may have heard about it. pretty big deal, lots of changes in the catholic church, made a whole bunch of news, put the latin mass out to pasture and also pulled back on the doctrine of deicide, ruffled a lot of feathers, etc.
There are some people who yearn for the aesthetics and cultural heritage of the latin mass. They miss the funny words in a language they don't speak, the historical continuity of the latin liturgy, etc. For these types, it's purely innocent aesthetic yearning, mostly harmless.
There are also some people who both miss the latin mass and feel very strongly about the perfidy of the jews being a theologically important teaching. These anti-semitic sedevacantist types share the same information ecology with all of the more harmless latin mass types. Dog whistles are a tool that can be used to disambiguate between the two types of latin-mass-enjoyers.
Fetishizing "western christian values" communicates different things when one of the most prominent far-right groups, the proud boys, makes this a central doctrine. If a latin-mass-enjoyer were to tell me they deeply valued western christian values, before airing their favorite anti-semitic conspiracies, I'm likely to predict they're not into latin mass for purely aesthetic reasons.
user982 · 2h ago
Someone once tried to make the argument to me that African Americans should feel eternal gratitude toward whites for fighting a war to free them. The fact of the matter is that America is one of the very few countries in history to fight a war to keep slavery.
fenomas · 1h ago
A quote I like from Wynton Marsalis: "with race in America it's never just black against white. It's always black and white against white."
scoofy · 1h ago
This type of reductionist take is unhelpful no matter who is making it. We can have a bunch of free states, with whites and blacks fighting for abolition as far back as the founding, and a bunch of slave states fighting for slavery.
Trying to flatten the situation into one general group vs another cannot explain the complexity of the situation, like the fact that there were black and mixed-race slave owners, or that Delaware fought for the Union Army despite being a slave state.
ty6853 · 1h ago
What will really blow your mind is what former slaves forged for in Liberia, after finding freedom for themselves.
dpkirchner · 1h ago
And we never actually ended slavery, we just changed the rules on how to enslave people (ie we must imprison them first).
typeofhuman · 2h ago
North Africa fought against the US to keep their slave trade.
Freedom2 · 2h ago
How will American HN commenters tell themselves they're the greatest country in the world now though?
typeofhuman · 2h ago
It is. It's crazy how everyone loves to criticize and hate on America yet clamor to be there.
ChrisClark · 2h ago
Oh god no, I'd never want to live there.
serf · 1h ago
Sure, whatever.
But surely you're not just deaf and blind to the mass allure for those other ~2.5m people a year who decide to come here.
_carbyau_ · 1h ago
The US runs a pretty big cultural show in modern culture. If you can look outside your own country at all, you've heard of the US.
But there are plenty of better places to be depending on what you value.
moomoo11 · 2h ago
Happy Juneteenth
Idk why so many people are upset or arguing. Sorry to add to the noise but I’m a naturalized citizen here and I feel like USA has so much history of doing better and moving things forward for everyone.
People all operate independently in thought here, but somehow since 1776 they have genuinely pushed society forward all things considered.
Everyone acting out of self interest but in a direction where things get better, objectively speaking, makes it a good society.
It is superior to living under dictatorships, corruption rotted “democracies”, or religious intolerance where the people always lose.
ty6853 · 1h ago
USA is nice if you like pew pew or freedom of speech, which to be fair are pretty fucking awesome. But if you just want a nice life, and possibly even more free economic opportunities, someplace like Dubai is way more accessible (esp if Indian or Chinese, etc) and you can have a good life. That is if you can stomach having absolutely no political power instead of next to none, and you can keep your mouth shut about dear leaders.
juddlyon · 2h ago
There are some wonderful photos and stories here, salute to the people at Texas Highways for putting this together.
From the article:
"The day was dubbed Emancipation Day but, slowly, the term Juneteenth — a portmanteau of June and 19th — took hold."
Debating the name instead of appreciating the holiday and gravity of the topic is missing the forrest for the trees. Just wow.
No comments yet
sfblah · 7h ago
I substantially prefer the term "Emancipation Day," as it gets the point across more clearly. Lots of people don't know what "Juneteenth" means, since it's not a real word.
jrm4 · 6h ago
I cannot possibly disagree with this more, "Juneteenth" is far superior.
Part of it is that it absolutely invokes AAVE. It forces people to consider and be reminded of Black American culture; "Emancipation Day" whitewashes the history a little bit and gives a little too much credit to the so-called "emancipators." Let's keep this centered on Black folks, where it belongs.
Invoking questions is a feature, not a bug.
logifail · 4h ago
> Part of it is that it absolutely invokes AAVE. It forces people to consider and be reminded of Black American culture
If you don't already know what "Juneteenth" means, the word itself gives you nothing to help you understand. Literally zilch. It involkes nothing.
"Emancipation Day" does give the outsider a clue.
Names matter.
ghushn3 · 3h ago
Ah, just like Easter, Christmas, Ramadan, Fat Tuesday, Valentine's Day, Purim, Holi, Passover, Cinco De Mayo, D-Day, etc. etc. etc.
Observances regularly don't give you a clue what they are about. Like, if you weren't already aware about Martin Luther King, Jr. day, you'd have to Google it to know what's up. Same with Rosh Hashana. Or Eid. I think you might be getting stuck on something that is demonstrably not a unique phenomena and it's reading a little like there's something about Juneteenth itself that's bothering you.
madeofpalk · 3h ago
The UK just gave up and named them "Late May Bank Holiday".
jrm4 · 4h ago
Again. GOOD GOOD GOOD.
What you have just told me is a FEATURE. Not a BUG.
I'm very GOOD with people "not immediately knowing." I like that. It forces them to learn about my people and culture.
"Juneteenth" makes you step in and perhaps get a little uncomfortable, like, hmm weird little Black-sounding phrase?
"Emancipation Day" frees (lol) you from engaging, you can just sort of take on the same ol same ol story, which, I imagine for many people starts with Abraham Lincoln and not Black people.
jwarden · 3h ago
I didn't realize "Juneteenth" was considered "Black-sounding" by some people. Juneteenth is a pretty culturally mainstream term (being a national holiday). And forming new words using contractions doesn't seem like a typically Black-person thing to do.
I associate the term with Black people, not because of how it sounds, but because I know what it means and know about it's origin among formerly-enslaved Black communities.
jrm4 · 45m ago
That's super interesting. I'm not why my assumptions are different, perhaps because I'm black and 48 years old?
trealira · 23m ago
Maybe you mainly heard it said by black people, so it just sounds black to you? Whereas someone who heard about it on Twitter in 2015 wouldn't have made the same subconscious association, even if it's explicitly about celebrating freeing black people from slavery.
IAmGraydon · 2h ago
I had this conversation with a group of people today and literally not one of them knew its true origin and the word never propelled them to look into it further. They just assumed (correctly) that someone came up with the name because it’s in June and the nineTEENTH day, but they didn’t realize the term was actually used long ago.
So take from that anecdote what you will, but I’ll admit the name kind of has a modern sound and I don’t think it spurs the kind of curiosity that you hope it does.
Also, FWIW, the name “Emancipation Day” is also a commonly used name for the holiday, though not as common as Juneteenth.
tzs · 1h ago
"Emancipation Day" is way too ambiguous in the US because there are already several other days that are called "Emancipation Day" in various states [1].
They mostly all have something to do with the ending of slavery but it is different things in different states. For example in Massachusetts it is on July 8th and commemorates slavery being found to be legally unenforceable there under in a 1783 decision.
I mean... you could just look it up, if you didn't know. Plenty of places have obscurely-named holidays (for instance, a number of countries have Whit Monday as a holiday; good luck figuring out what _that_ is from the name...)
pessimizer · 4h ago
Do Thanksgiving.
Also, if Serbia has some holidays that I can't recognize when I read them from a calendar, should Serbia change the names of them for me? Or is it only the words that black Americans use that aren't real when random people don't recognize them?
almostgotcaught · 3h ago
> "Emancipation Day" does give the outsider a clue.
shall we also rename shabbat and yom kippur and purim so that "outsiders" can have a clue?
people are so tone deaf sometimes - it's not for you - it's for the people whose ancestors were freed on this day.
> the word itself gives you nothing to help you understand
neither does any other word that you don't bother to look up in dictionary or encyclopedia.
stirfish · 2h ago
Actually, I guess we have! Notice how you typed "shabbat" and not "שבת". Much easier to Google.
typeofhuman · 3h ago
I disagree. I think it should be centered on the western, Christian values that lead to the abolishing of a long practiced tradition.
jrm4 · 41m ago
I legitimately can't tell if this is satire.
Anyway, as a Black Christian, I always tell people on both sides -- know what religion is most responsible for slavery in the US?
Christianity.
And also, know what religion is most responsible for freedom for Black folks in the Us?
Also Christianity.
It's just complicated.
Not "western" of course, but the traditions/organization of Black churches.
_elf · 2h ago
I'm unaware of a large non-Christian population living in the Confederate States of America.
No comments yet
KittenInABox · 3h ago
The western, Christian values explicitly had slavery in them. The slave owners were Christian. I don't really see how religion has to do with the abolishment of race-based slavery, sadly.
typeofhuman · 2h ago
Which values explicitly supported slavery?
trealira · 42m ago
Slave owners would cite Ephesians 6:5-6.
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart.
It is an old neologism, but the style feels surprisingly modern, and/or AAVE is so dominant today that even (youngish?) white people would have coined this type of abbreviation today.
> on June 19, 1866… "Jubilee Day"
> The Black community began using the word Juneteenth for Jubilee Day early in the 1890s.
ryanmcbride · 7h ago
Well they've got plenty of time to learn.
As far as I know most people consider Emancipation Day the day that the Emancipation Proclamation was signed into law in 1863, whereas Juneteenth marks the day 2.5 years later that the last known enslaved people were freed from the people who decided to just not tell them about the law.
dragonwriter · 6h ago
> Juneteenth marks the day 2.5 years later that the last known enslaved people were freed
Nope, just the last in the Confederate States; the last Union chattel slaves (e.g., in Delaware) were freed by operation of law a few months later with the ratification of the 13th Amendment.
(And that's not even discussing penal slavery allowed under the 13th Amendment.)
TremendousJudge · 4h ago
>(And that's not even discussing penal slavery allowed under the 13th Amendment.)
To expand on this, knowingbetter did an in-depth video on this topic[0]. The salient bit is that penal slavery was ended in 1941-1942 by Roosevelt, so that the Japanese couldn't use it as war propaganda against the US.
This is not true. The last slaves in the United States were set free by the thirteenth amendment in Delaware, IIRC. Emancipation Day could make sense as the last slaves freed by the emancipation proclamation took place on that date.
A common misconception holds that the Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves in the United States, or that the General Order No. 3 on June 19, 1865, marked the end of slavery in the United States. In fact, the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified and proclaimed in December 1865, was the article that made slavery illegal in the United States nationwide, not the Emancipation Proclamation.[6][7][8][9]
Another common misconception is that it took over two years for news of the Emancipation Proclamation to reach Texas, and that slaves did not know they had already been freed by it. In fact, news of the Proclamation had reached Texas long before 1865, and many slaves knew about Lincoln's order emancipating them, but they had not been freed since the Union army had yet to reach Texas to enforce the Proclamation. Only after the arrival of the Union army and General Order No. 3 was the Proclamation widely enforced in Texas.
lukas099 · 6h ago
In my opinion, we still have slaves in the USA. (In prison, as explicitly allowed by the 13th Amendment)
wileydragonfly · 1h ago
Just stop. Better is better. Let’s celebrate progress and not thump Wikipedia.
ryanmcbride · 6h ago
Interesting thanks for the information.
Regardless, people have been calling it Juneteenth for over a hundred years, it was made a national holiday as Juneteenth, I'm gonna keep calling it that.
ghastmaster · 5h ago
In Texas and maybe celebrated in other places(I haven't done the research) this is true. For a large swath of the United States it was obscure or unknown. Most of us learned about the Emancipation Proclamation though. Making Juneteenth a holiday rather than the Date of the Emancipation Proclamation is odd to me. It is as odd to me as say, celebrating Independence Day on the date the last colony got word of the signing on, hypothetically, July 5th.
mateo411 · 5h ago
The Emancipation Proclamation freed very few slaves. The order did not apply to areas of the Union which still had slaves, nor did it apply to areas of the Confederacy occupied by the Union. Although, it did apply to unoccupied areas of the Confederacy. The government of the Confederacy was unlikely to follow an order issued by the Union during the Civil War.
It may have encouraged some slaves in the Confederacy to flee, if they found out about it.
stirfish · 6h ago
>The last slaves in the United States were set free by the thirteenth amendment
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
You may be surprised to learn that, coincidentally, America has more people in prison than anywhere else.
ImJamal · 6h ago
Did the Emancipation Proclamation actual emancipate anybody? The South didn't free them and the proclamation explicitly allowed the Northern states that had slavery to continue to have slaves.
stonemetal12 · 6h ago
Yes it did. When the Northern army was in Southern territory they would free the local slaves. They would then recruit volunteers into the army. Not sure how many they freed but they did pick up about 200k soldiers that way.
bilbo0s · 6h ago
Not to put too fine a point on it, but maybe that's why black Americans celebrate Juneteenth instead?
Kind of makes sense to me.
mistrial9 · 4h ago
African-Americans in coastal California for the most part do not care about Juneteenth.. African-American politicians do try to get a photo op. A very large majority of low income African-Americans in North and Southern California, do not care about this day, do not mention it, do not do special events for it, do not mark it on any calendar or gather with special clothes on for it. compare and contrast to "Kwanzaa" also
source: been there, done that
dragonwriter · 4h ago
> Black Americans in coastal California do not care about Juneteenth..
Some do, some don't. "Black Americans in Coastal California" aren't a homogenous group, and this varies a lot by things like family geographic history, socioeconomic status, and a variety of other factors.
Source: Also been there, also done that.
bilbo0s · 4h ago
Sorry, what do you guys mean by "been there, done that"?
Do you mean that you're slave descended black americans, and, in the case of HN User mistrial9, therefore speak for most of the slave descended black americans in coastal California?
Or do you guys mean that you celebrate Juneteenth. Thus, "been there, done that"?
The former I would challenge you on, despite obviously not being "black american coastal Californian?". The latter I would never challenge you on as that's your business.
Larrikin · 3h ago
It's a federal holiday now so there eventually will be a tradition around the whole country.
Black AF takes place in California and the main character had a huge celebration with his entire extended family before it was even a federal holiday.
pvg · 7h ago
Trucktober and Frappuccino aren't "real words" but most Americans know what they mean. The unfamiliarity with Juneteenth is not due to the unrealness of the word.
loughnane · 7h ago
Both of those are portmanteau's, giving hints as to their meaning. No such thing with Juneteenth.
I agree lack of familiarity isn't because it's "unreal"---we invent words all the time, but I agree with OP that we could have come up with a better name. I bet if you I were to walk down the street here and ask 10 people what Juneteenth is only 1 would be able to do better than: "something to do with freeing the slaves".
quesera · 6h ago
How is "Juneteenth" any less of a portmanteau than "Frappuccino"?
It's been called Juneteenth for more than a century, and has been a state holiday for almost half a century.
Wouldn't it be even more ridiculous if the US federal government took an existing celebration and renamed it?
loughnane · 5h ago
There both portmanteau but Frappuccino combines two things you can envision. A date doesn’t unless the association already existed.
Regardless of its history I venture that 95% of the population hadn’t heard the word before 2020, so it’s not like it was in the public consciousness.
You’re right though, even if almost joined knew about it, it _did_ have a name and so def tough to change it.
pvg · 5h ago
A June and a -teenth is no harder to envision than a Frapp and a CCino. It's a silly tangent.
loughnane · 4h ago
Agree it’s a silly nitpick of language. I’ll keep picking.
Picturing a frappe and cappuccino gives you a sense for what a Frappuccino _is_. Picturing june and thirteenth/nineteenth only gives you sense for _when_ it is.
In only contend a better name would be one where the name suggests something about the content to someone hearing it for the first time.
pyridines · 3h ago
Another American holiday coming up with an equally useless name is Fourth of July. Nobody seems to have a problem with that name, and nobody I know calls it Independence Day. Neither Fourth of July or Juneteenth are great names out of context, but they both have histories behind them and can't be changed anymore.
Heck, Juneteenth is a better name, since it is not literally month+day.
pvg · 4h ago
The name of the holiday, so named by the people affected, is a century and change old. The problem isn't the quality of the name, which is where we started.
derstander · 3h ago
Wait until you hear about September through December not being the 7th through 10th months of the year.
They don’t even give you a sense for _when_ they are. Or, more accurately, they give you the _wrong_ sense for when they are by name alone.
ghushn3 · 3h ago
Wait until you hear about Cinco De Mayo!
assimpleaspossi · 2h ago
In the case of Frappuccino, many people care. In the other case, most people don't care.
Zigurd · 5h ago
I'm white AF and this thread is cringe. "We" didn't name it, for starters. It would take an electron microscope to find the amount of self-awareness to avoid suggesting better alternatives. Damn.
Jordan-117 · 6h ago
June (nine)teenth, seems pretty straightforward to me. Clearer than All Hallows' Evening --> Halloween.
>I bet if you I were to walk down the street here and ask 10 people what Juneteenth is only 1 would be able to do better than: "something to do with freeing the slaves".
And lots of people think Cinco de Mayo is Mexico's Independence Day, doesn't make the holiday any less valid. It's just an issue of education.
loughnane · 5h ago
I’m not saying the holiday isn’t valid, I think it’s a great holiday. The name is all I take exception to.
Eventually we’ll all know what it is, but that eventually would be sooner with a better name.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF · 4h ago
> but that eventually would be sooner with a better name
Do you have some basis for thinking this? I rather suspect the reason White Americans don't know about it has more to do with the fact that it celebrates Black American history and culture, which is just not that popular among White Americans. (Of course there are exceptions, but the point is they're exceptions.) I seriously doubt that the name is the problem. The problem is that relatively few people are interested.
naniwaduni · 5h ago
The really striking thing is how poorly the name distinguishes the date from the seven days before it...
Jordan-117 · 4h ago
Ju(ne) n(in)eteenth! :D
qualeed · 6h ago
>ask 10 people what Juneteenth is only 1 would be able to do better than: "something to do with freeing the slaves".
That shouldn't be considered a naming failure. It's an education failure.
pc86 · 5h ago
Ask the same 10 people what "Emancipation Day" is and you'll have 7 or 8 people say the same thing even though it's not even an actual holiday.
loughnane · 5h ago
It’s both. The name Juneteenth requires more education than, say, emancipation day or something along those lines.
Easy names require less “education” than hard names.
No comments yet
pvg · 6h ago
Juneteenth is the same sort of portmanteau as Trucktober. Plus holidays have weird names. What's a Christmas, a Mardi Gras, a Festivus? It's almost entirely a matter of usage and familiarity.
SketchySeaBeast · 5h ago
Yeah, people get their knickers in a twist about Juneteenth but will say "February" like that makes complete sense.
delecti · 6h ago
I mean, Christ Mass is also the same sort of portmanteau.
And as an aside, I was curious about Festivus. Apparently it's Latin for "excellent, jovial, lively."
You're pre-qualified for the Feats of Strength but not, so far, for the Airing of Grievances.
ryanmcbride · 6h ago
This is such a weird hill to die on
loughnane · 5h ago
I’m not dying on this hill, I just think the name could be better, but I don’t particularly care. It’s not as though I’ve got a beef with the celebrating the freedom of slaves. I think that’s essential for America to celebrate.
pessimizer · 4h ago
It's simply important, while celebrating slavery, to correct the way that black people speak. Just so they'll be understood. Just so they'll know that regular people don't talk like that.
browningstreet · 4h ago
White guy here, and I have never heard of "Trucktober"..
I'm also going to my local Juneteenth events (in Oakland).. that said, I did have to look it up a few years ago.
EDIT: Yeah, downvote me, I replied to the wrong sub-thread post. Made more sense w/r/t resistance to Juneteenth naming.
You must be some sort of communist! There's a Trucktober question on the naturalization test, right before the one about Thanksgiving.
libraryatnight · 4h ago
I don't know what your point is. You know Frappaccino? So his point stands? Regardless of his examples, we deal with no end of made up nonsense words, rarely anybody bats an eye until it sounds black and has to do with black people.And yes, this is a thing, this thread is the umpteenth one I've encountered today with people undermining and questioning the name for what amounts to it sounding black.
So your anecdote isn't useful. Kind of the opposite.
I'm pretty sure less than 1% of people in the EU would know what Juneteenth means. I didn't remember either. I just remembered I read it somewhere before and would have guessed it was something like pi day or star wars day.
bilbo0s · 6h ago
Why would anyone in Europe, know when the slaves in the US were freed? Or even when the slaves in Brazil were freed? Or Peru? Or Colombia? Or Cuba?
I mean won't every nation have its own history and important days? And it seems to me that those days in every nation will be different. I'd even wager very few of us, (far less than 1%), know what those important days are called in other nations.
tempaway43563 · 5h ago
argument about naming conventions is exactly what I expected to find on hn
antonymoose · 5h ago
It’s not just an argument of name, it’s an argument of when. Go down to Charleston, SC where the local black population celebrates Emancipation Day on January 1st and has for a long, long time.
Juneteenth is in that context as artificial a holiday as Kwanza. I would imagine most other southern states have similar breaks with the Juneteenth holiday, in that it doesn’t represent the historical reality of their community.
No comments yet
chgs · 4h ago
Thank you. As a non American I have no idea what it means - only knew something was up because the us markets didn’t seem to be moving.
pessimizer · 4h ago
Why should the names of American holidays mean something to non-Americans? Would you know what Thanksgiving meant without looking it up?
John23832 · 6h ago
Not to be snarky, but they should just learn what it means? I could just as easily not know what emancipation means. I frankly have some family members that I'm sure don't.
- At least one local bank website I've gone to today has a banner saying it is closed and uses the word "Juneteenth."
This seems to be reasonable enough to consider it a real word.
Additionally, the term "Emancipation Day" is inaccurate (and therefore obfuscatory) because slavery is still legal and constitutional if you are convicted of a crime. Emancipation doesn't accurately describe the current state unless this is no longer true. I'm going by this dictionary definition of "emancipation": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/emancipation
GLdRH · 6h ago
I'm pretty sure you're making a political point but: How are criminals enslaved? Who owns them?
axus · 6h ago
Here's an article, the power relationship was exercised by denying parole that would have otherwise been granted without a profit motive:
https://archive.ph/0gVie
"Since 2018, about 575 companies and more than 100 public agencies in Alabama have used incarcerated people as landscapers, janitors, drivers, metal fabricators and fast-food workers, the lawsuit states, reaping an annual benefit of $450 million."
ryanmcbride · 6h ago
The prisons. I mean more specifically the state or federal government ultimately but the prisons more practically.
You know in movies and cartoons and stuff when you'd see like, a whole bunch of prisoners in striped pajamas, chained together breaking rocks or digging ditches or whatever? Those are depictions of an enslaved workforce.
GLdRH · 6h ago
Forced labor for criminals isn't the same as being a slave. They are not owned by the state.
We have a similar sounding exception clause in Germany, and nobody would call the prisoners slaves.
That being said, I don't doubt that the american prison systems has severe problems, for example the one raised in the other answer to my previous comment.
delecti · 6h ago
The text of the 13th amendment makes a direct equivalence between the chattel slavery it outlawed and the incarcerated forced labor that it left unaffected:
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, *except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted*, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction
The plain reading of that text is that slavery remains a permitted punishment in the US.
GLdRH · 6h ago
I don't know much about constitutional law, either german or american, but I know you often can't just "plain read" the text.
stirfish · 5h ago
Maybe some additional context would help.
Right after the civil war,
1. slavery became illegal, except as punishment for a crime
2. a ton of vague laws sprung up, like "malicious mischief". Look up "Jim Crow" or "black codes" to get a sense of these.
3. States started "convict-leasing" out prisoners as a source of income, often right back to the plantations that slaves were liberated from before. The convicted were not paid for this labor.
Additional context: Virginia Supreme Court rules that inmates are slaves to the state in 1871: https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/slaves-s... Virginia held the capitol of the Confederacy - the states that tried to leave the USA to retain their slaves.
I forget why the crime exception was added to the 13th amendment, but I assume it was to make it more palatable to the states that still wanted slaves
JohnFen · 6h ago
> Forced labor for criminals isn't the same as being a slave.
The difference is so slight as to be meaningless.
ryanmcbride · 6h ago
That's cool but I'm not talking about Germany.
stirfish · 5h ago
> nobody would call the prisoners slaves.
We Americans don't like doing that either, because it makes us uncomfortable.
>Forced labor for criminals isn't the same as being a slave. They are not owned by the state.
I'm having trouble understanding how it's different. They are held by the state, forced to work, are not free to leave, and we have a bit of a history...
SoftTalker · 5h ago
It’s the “convicted of a crime” part that makes it different.
lukas099 · 4h ago
So we've come to the difference of opinions, which is that your definition of slavery excludes those convicted of a crime, while others' doesn't. Not a very interesting point to debate on.
SoftTalker · 4h ago
Yes, I think there is a difference between being kidnapped from your home, shipped across the ocean and sold into a life of servitude (with any children you have being born into the same condition, or yourself being born into such a situation) vs. doing labor as part of a sentence for a crime of which you have been duly convicted (and will someday be released from). That is my opinion.
stirfish · 3h ago
Would your opinion change if the legal system that permitted people to be kidnapped, shipped, and sold, was the same system that decided if you're a criminal fit to be kidnapped, shipped, and sold?
The value system and moral framework of the abolishinists spanned beyond the confines of country.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's not about being nice, but on Hacker News we operate according to guidelines and norms that have evolved over more than 15 years, which keep discussions focused on substance and prevent it from burning to the ground the way most online communities do.
Please do your part to make this place better not worse. The point you made above was a valid and valuable one, but the way you expressed it means its value is lost.
If you looked at the adjacent comments you would immediately see a combination of "western christian values," and open pondering that "Epstein is an Israeli asset. Democrats and Republicans have loyalty to Israel." This alone is enough dog whistling for at least my neighborhood's dogs to start acting up.
To put it into terms that may hit closer to home:
Remember Vatican 2? you may have heard about it. pretty big deal, lots of changes in the catholic church, made a whole bunch of news, put the latin mass out to pasture and also pulled back on the doctrine of deicide, ruffled a lot of feathers, etc.
There are some people who yearn for the aesthetics and cultural heritage of the latin mass. They miss the funny words in a language they don't speak, the historical continuity of the latin liturgy, etc. For these types, it's purely innocent aesthetic yearning, mostly harmless.
There are also some people who both miss the latin mass and feel very strongly about the perfidy of the jews being a theologically important teaching. These anti-semitic sedevacantist types share the same information ecology with all of the more harmless latin mass types. Dog whistles are a tool that can be used to disambiguate between the two types of latin-mass-enjoyers.
Fetishizing "western christian values" communicates different things when one of the most prominent far-right groups, the proud boys, makes this a central doctrine. If a latin-mass-enjoyer were to tell me they deeply valued western christian values, before airing their favorite anti-semitic conspiracies, I'm likely to predict they're not into latin mass for purely aesthetic reasons.
Trying to flatten the situation into one general group vs another cannot explain the complexity of the situation, like the fact that there were black and mixed-race slave owners, or that Delaware fought for the Union Army despite being a slave state.
But surely you're not just deaf and blind to the mass allure for those other ~2.5m people a year who decide to come here.
But there are plenty of better places to be depending on what you value.
Idk why so many people are upset or arguing. Sorry to add to the noise but I’m a naturalized citizen here and I feel like USA has so much history of doing better and moving things forward for everyone.
People all operate independently in thought here, but somehow since 1776 they have genuinely pushed society forward all things considered.
Everyone acting out of self interest but in a direction where things get better, objectively speaking, makes it a good society.
It is superior to living under dictatorships, corruption rotted “democracies”, or religious intolerance where the people always lose.
From the article:
"The day was dubbed Emancipation Day but, slowly, the term Juneteenth — a portmanteau of June and 19th — took hold."
Debating the name instead of appreciating the holiday and gravity of the topic is missing the forrest for the trees. Just wow.
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Part of it is that it absolutely invokes AAVE. It forces people to consider and be reminded of Black American culture; "Emancipation Day" whitewashes the history a little bit and gives a little too much credit to the so-called "emancipators." Let's keep this centered on Black folks, where it belongs.
Invoking questions is a feature, not a bug.
If you don't already know what "Juneteenth" means, the word itself gives you nothing to help you understand. Literally zilch. It involkes nothing.
"Emancipation Day" does give the outsider a clue.
Names matter.
Observances regularly don't give you a clue what they are about. Like, if you weren't already aware about Martin Luther King, Jr. day, you'd have to Google it to know what's up. Same with Rosh Hashana. Or Eid. I think you might be getting stuck on something that is demonstrably not a unique phenomena and it's reading a little like there's something about Juneteenth itself that's bothering you.
What you have just told me is a FEATURE. Not a BUG.
I'm very GOOD with people "not immediately knowing." I like that. It forces them to learn about my people and culture.
"Juneteenth" makes you step in and perhaps get a little uncomfortable, like, hmm weird little Black-sounding phrase?
"Emancipation Day" frees (lol) you from engaging, you can just sort of take on the same ol same ol story, which, I imagine for many people starts with Abraham Lincoln and not Black people.
I associate the term with Black people, not because of how it sounds, but because I know what it means and know about it's origin among formerly-enslaved Black communities.
So take from that anecdote what you will, but I’ll admit the name kind of has a modern sound and I don’t think it spurs the kind of curiosity that you hope it does.
Also, FWIW, the name “Emancipation Day” is also a commonly used name for the holiday, though not as common as Juneteenth.
They mostly all have something to do with the ending of slavery but it is different things in different states. For example in Massachusetts it is on July 8th and commemorates slavery being found to be legally unenforceable there under in a 1783 decision.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_Day#United_States
Also, if Serbia has some holidays that I can't recognize when I read them from a calendar, should Serbia change the names of them for me? Or is it only the words that black Americans use that aren't real when random people don't recognize them?
shall we also rename shabbat and yom kippur and purim so that "outsiders" can have a clue?
people are so tone deaf sometimes - it's not for you - it's for the people whose ancestors were freed on this day.
> the word itself gives you nothing to help you understand
neither does any other word that you don't bother to look up in dictionary or encyclopedia.
Anyway, as a Black Christian, I always tell people on both sides -- know what religion is most responsible for slavery in the US?
Christianity.
And also, know what religion is most responsible for freedom for Black folks in the Us?
Also Christianity.
It's just complicated.
Not "western" of course, but the traditions/organization of Black churches.
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Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_slavery
I thought it was a neologism until I looked it up. Turns out, I'm just white.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juneteenth
> on June 19, 1866… "Jubilee Day"
> The Black community began using the word Juneteenth for Jubilee Day early in the 1890s.
As far as I know most people consider Emancipation Day the day that the Emancipation Proclamation was signed into law in 1863, whereas Juneteenth marks the day 2.5 years later that the last known enslaved people were freed from the people who decided to just not tell them about the law.
Nope, just the last in the Confederate States; the last Union chattel slaves (e.g., in Delaware) were freed by operation of law a few months later with the ratification of the 13th Amendment.
(And that's not even discussing penal slavery allowed under the 13th Amendment.)
To expand on this, knowingbetter did an in-depth video on this topic[0]. The salient bit is that penal slavery was ended in 1941-1942 by Roosevelt, so that the Japanese couldn't use it as war propaganda against the US.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA
General Order No. 3 - June 19, 1865
Thirteenth Amendment - December 6, 1865
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Order_No._3#Misconcept...
Text:
A common misconception holds that the Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves in the United States, or that the General Order No. 3 on June 19, 1865, marked the end of slavery in the United States. In fact, the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified and proclaimed in December 1865, was the article that made slavery illegal in the United States nationwide, not the Emancipation Proclamation.[6][7][8][9]
Another common misconception is that it took over two years for news of the Emancipation Proclamation to reach Texas, and that slaves did not know they had already been freed by it. In fact, news of the Proclamation had reached Texas long before 1865, and many slaves knew about Lincoln's order emancipating them, but they had not been freed since the Union army had yet to reach Texas to enforce the Proclamation. Only after the arrival of the Union army and General Order No. 3 was the Proclamation widely enforced in Texas.
Regardless, people have been calling it Juneteenth for over a hundred years, it was made a national holiday as Juneteenth, I'm gonna keep calling it that.
It may have encouraged some slaves in the Confederacy to flee, if they found out about it.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
You may be surprised to learn that, coincidentally, America has more people in prison than anywhere else.
Kind of makes sense to me.
source: been there, done that
Some do, some don't. "Black Americans in Coastal California" aren't a homogenous group, and this varies a lot by things like family geographic history, socioeconomic status, and a variety of other factors.
Source: Also been there, also done that.
Do you mean that you're slave descended black americans, and, in the case of HN User mistrial9, therefore speak for most of the slave descended black americans in coastal California?
Or do you guys mean that you celebrate Juneteenth. Thus, "been there, done that"?
The former I would challenge you on, despite obviously not being "black american coastal Californian?". The latter I would never challenge you on as that's your business.
Black AF takes place in California and the main character had a huge celebration with his entire extended family before it was even a federal holiday.
I agree lack of familiarity isn't because it's "unreal"---we invent words all the time, but I agree with OP that we could have come up with a better name. I bet if you I were to walk down the street here and ask 10 people what Juneteenth is only 1 would be able to do better than: "something to do with freeing the slaves".
It's been called Juneteenth for more than a century, and has been a state holiday for almost half a century.
Wouldn't it be even more ridiculous if the US federal government took an existing celebration and renamed it?
Regardless of its history I venture that 95% of the population hadn’t heard the word before 2020, so it’s not like it was in the public consciousness.
You’re right though, even if almost joined knew about it, it _did_ have a name and so def tough to change it.
Picturing a frappe and cappuccino gives you a sense for what a Frappuccino _is_. Picturing june and thirteenth/nineteenth only gives you sense for _when_ it is.
In only contend a better name would be one where the name suggests something about the content to someone hearing it for the first time.
Heck, Juneteenth is a better name, since it is not literally month+day.
They don’t even give you a sense for _when_ they are. Or, more accurately, they give you the _wrong_ sense for when they are by name alone.
>I bet if you I were to walk down the street here and ask 10 people what Juneteenth is only 1 would be able to do better than: "something to do with freeing the slaves".
And lots of people think Cinco de Mayo is Mexico's Independence Day, doesn't make the holiday any less valid. It's just an issue of education.
Eventually we’ll all know what it is, but that eventually would be sooner with a better name.
Do you have some basis for thinking this? I rather suspect the reason White Americans don't know about it has more to do with the fact that it celebrates Black American history and culture, which is just not that popular among White Americans. (Of course there are exceptions, but the point is they're exceptions.) I seriously doubt that the name is the problem. The problem is that relatively few people are interested.
That shouldn't be considered a naming failure. It's an education failure.
Easy names require less “education” than hard names.
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And as an aside, I was curious about Festivus. Apparently it's Latin for "excellent, jovial, lively."
The writer of this episode based it on something from his family that his father did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oeu2cVABHg
I'm also going to my local Juneteenth events (in Oakland).. that said, I did have to look it up a few years ago.
EDIT: Yeah, downvote me, I replied to the wrong sub-thread post. Made more sense w/r/t resistance to Juneteenth naming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzPBaC6VPuU
You must be some sort of communist! There's a Trucktober question on the naturalization test, right before the one about Thanksgiving.
So your anecdote isn't useful. Kind of the opposite.
I mean won't every nation have its own history and important days? And it seems to me that those days in every nation will be different. I'd even wager very few of us, (far less than 1%), know what those important days are called in other nations.
Juneteenth is in that context as artificial a holiday as Kwanza. I would imagine most other southern states have similar breaks with the Juneteenth holiday, in that it doesn’t represent the historical reality of their community.
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- At least one local bank website I've gone to today has a banner saying it is closed and uses the word "Juneteenth."
This seems to be reasonable enough to consider it a real word.
Additionally, the term "Emancipation Day" is inaccurate (and therefore obfuscatory) because slavery is still legal and constitutional if you are convicted of a crime. Emancipation doesn't accurately describe the current state unless this is no longer true. I'm going by this dictionary definition of "emancipation": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/emancipation
"Since 2018, about 575 companies and more than 100 public agencies in Alabama have used incarcerated people as landscapers, janitors, drivers, metal fabricators and fast-food workers, the lawsuit states, reaping an annual benefit of $450 million."
The 13th amendment specifically carves out an exception to allow prisoners to be enslaved. They aren't just using political rhetoric: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_exception_clause
You know in movies and cartoons and stuff when you'd see like, a whole bunch of prisoners in striped pajamas, chained together breaking rocks or digging ditches or whatever? Those are depictions of an enslaved workforce.
That being said, I don't doubt that the american prison systems has severe problems, for example the one raised in the other answer to my previous comment.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, *except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted*, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction
The plain reading of that text is that slavery remains a permitted punishment in the US.
Right after the civil war,
1. slavery became illegal, except as punishment for a crime
2. a ton of vague laws sprung up, like "malicious mischief". Look up "Jim Crow" or "black codes" to get a sense of these.
3. States started "convict-leasing" out prisoners as a source of income, often right back to the plantations that slaves were liberated from before. The convicted were not paid for this labor.
Additional context: Virginia Supreme Court rules that inmates are slaves to the state in 1871: https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/slaves-s... Virginia held the capitol of the Confederacy - the states that tried to leave the USA to retain their slaves.
I forget why the crime exception was added to the 13th amendment, but I assume it was to make it more palatable to the states that still wanted slaves
The difference is so slight as to be meaningless.
We Americans don't like doing that either, because it makes us uncomfortable.
>Forced labor for criminals isn't the same as being a slave. They are not owned by the state.
I'm having trouble understanding how it's different. They are held by the state, forced to work, are not free to leave, and we have a bit of a history...