Happy Juneteenth! A reminder that we can change as a country. May we never have to liberate by war again.
sfblah · 2h 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 · 1h 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.
No comments yet
lukas099 · 1h ago
> The Black community began using the word Juneteenth for Jubilee Day early in the 1890s. [1]
I thought it was a neologism until I looked it up. Turns out, I'm just white.
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 · 2h 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 · 1h 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.)
ImJamal · 1h 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 · 59m 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 · 1h 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.
ghastmaster · 2h ago
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 · 1h ago
In my opinion, we still have slaves in the USA. (In prison, as explicitly allowed by the 13th Amendment)
ryanmcbride · 1h 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.
mateo411 · 52m 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 · 1h 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.
pvg · 2h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 51m 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 · 45m ago
A June and a -teenth is no harder to envision than a Frapp and a CCino. It's a silly tangent.
Jordan-117 · 1h 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 · 54m 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.
naniwaduni · 53m ago
The really striking thing is how poorly the name distinguishes the date from the seven days before it...
Zigurd · 22m 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.
pvg · 1h 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.
delecti · 1h 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."
pvg · 1h ago
You're pre-qualified for the Feats of Strength but not, so far, for the Airing of Grievances.
qualeed · 1h 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 · 47m 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 · 49m 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.
qualeed · 45m ago
It's weird that people say this about Juneteenth, but I've never seen this line of thinking with "Halloween" or "Christmas" or "Easter", etc.
I don't know about you, but I would never guess that "Halloween" means "knock on doors for candy" or that "Christmas" means "fat guy delivering presents via chimneys" from the name.
The name has been around for more than 100 years. It's an education failure, plain and simple.
ryanmcbride · 1h ago
This is such a weird hill to die on
loughnane · 47m 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.
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 · 1h 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 · 38m ago
argument about naming conventions is exactly what I expected to find on hn
antonymoose · 9m 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.
John23832 · 1h 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 · 1h ago
I'm pretty sure you're making a political point but: How are criminals enslaved? Who owns them?
axus · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 58m 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 · 37m 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 · 1h ago
> Forced labor for criminals isn't the same as being a slave.
The difference is so slight as to be meaningless.
ryanmcbride · 1h ago
That's cool but I'm not talking about Germany.
stirfish · 56m 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...
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.
No comments yet
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.)
Kind of makes sense to me.
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.
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.
>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.
And as an aside, I was curious about Festivus. Apparently it's Latin for "excellent, jovial, lively."
That shouldn't be considered a naming failure. It's an education failure.
Easy names require less “education” than hard names.
I don't know about you, but I would never guess that "Halloween" means "knock on doors for candy" or that "Christmas" means "fat guy delivering presents via chimneys" from the name.
The name has been around for more than 100 years. It's an education failure, plain and simple.
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.
- 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...