Celebrating Juneteenth

A call to stop the whitewash of history

Jemar Tisby is a historian and advocate for social justice who today compares Juneteenth to America 250. Here is how he begins on his substack, Footnotes:

Two anniversaries fall just weeks apart this summer, and they ask two very different questions.

America 250 asks: how great have we been? Juneteenth asks: how free are we, really?

That second question doesn’t have a comfortable answer.

A Question We Must Answer

How free are we, really, when majority-Black voting districts are being redrawn right now to dilute Black political power?

How free are we, really, when the wealth gap between white and Black families hasn’t closed?

How free are we, really, when Black people remain disproportionately incarcerated, and unarmed Black people are still killed with little accountability?

Juneteenth is a cause for celebration. But it doesn’t stop there. It demands an reckoning.

You should go watch Jemar’s video where he discusses the difference between the two celebrations and also check out his chart where he does the same. I don’t want to reproduce it all here. Go give his Substack some traffic. But let me quote him one more time about the whitewashed history being sold by the current administration.

Name the cost, celebrate the real progress, and refuse any version of the story that makes Black freedom a footnote rather than the foundation of U.S. history.

Honest portrayals of enslavement and other aspects of history have been whitewashed by the Trump administration. Trump 250 has been more about him and his rosy view of American history than anything else.

In The Christian Past That Wasn’t, one of the myths I confront is this: “America’s Virtues Justify America’s Sins.” In that chapter, I discuss the whitewashed history promoted by Christian nationalists to sanitize the record of atrocities against Indigenous people and people of color. The chapter resonates with Jemar’s call for a true and accurate history even though it a painful one. On page 224, I ask who’s missing in the Christian nationalist history?

WHO’S MISSING IN THIS HISTORY?

Despite all the Puritans’ sermons, Ben Franklin’s calls to prayer, Mason Weems’s stories, and David Barton’s artifacts, some voices were silenced throughout the entire period America was supposedly being inspired by God Almighty. While the white men were arguing and agonizing over their religious freedom, Black people had no freedom of any kind. Indigenous people saw their civilization slowly stolen and their families decimated. Women couldn’t vote until long after the founding of the country. The history I have written about thus far has been a white man’s history.

The myths I have discussed thus far are in the service of propping up a view of America that ran parallel to the reality of race-based chattel slavery and the theft of land and life from Indigenous people. White culture warriors want to argue about America as a Christian nation based on how many Bible verses a founding father used in a speech, or what orthodox doctrine a white, slave-owning founder admitted to believing in a letter to another white, slave-owning founder. How is it possible to focus on a small matter of what the founders said they believed when the weightier matter of the sin they lived with every day is right there with no comment?

Indeed, we come to a central question of this entire project. This question occupies the space between the Christian past that was and the Christian past that wasn’t. It’s the one that no Christian nationalist storyteller has adequately answered. It is this: With deception, theft, racism, enslavement, lynchings, and other atrocities embedded in the heritage and history of the nation, what does it matter how many times God is mentioned in the Declaration of Independence or whether there is some faint echo of a Bible verse in the Constitution?

Christian nationalist history strains out gnats and swallows camels.

I say it doesn’t matter. No matter how you look at it, Christian nationalists don’t have a good case that the United States was or is a Christian nation.

Juneteenth does not allow us whitewash the history of the nation. In this connection I invite you to consider Robert P. Jones suggestions about celebrating Juneteenth and Independence Day and again to review Jemar Tisby’s post today on Juneteenth vs. America 250.

For more information about or to purchase The Christian Past That Wasn’t, go to Christianpast.com

My 2025 Juneteenth post with historical information on the holiday.