LIBERTARIAN JUNETEENTH, TRANSGRESSIVE JUNETEENTH?

If yesterday's post was the history lesson, today we dip into the political economy, with a diversion into cultural studies.  I'll let New York Post commentator Kendall Qualls open, with what on other days might qualify as a Friday short take.  "Let’s celebrate Juneteenth as long as we understand that it all started with July 4th."  You'd think that "conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" would have codified that for all time, but there are people who let Platonic perfection get in the way of an emergence that is messy enough, and we'll return to Mr Qualls to close the post.

Jack Hunter also offers what would otherwise be a short take.  "Juneteenth isn’t ‘woke.’ It’s as American as apple pie."  His conclusion: "While Juneteenth naturally will mean more to many black Americans given that history and the suffering, it truly is a no-brainer holiday for anyone who values human freedom to celebrate."  For Lincoln, and liberty too.

David Boaz argued, in Huffington Post no less, that the most important libertarian accomplishment was the abolition of slavery.

The greatest libertarian crusade in history was the effort to abolish chattel slavery, culminating in the nineteenth‐century abolitionist movement and the heroic Underground Railroad. It’s no accident that abolitionism emerged out of the ferment of the Industrial Revolution and the American Revolution.

How could Americans proclaim that “all men are created equal … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” without noticing that they themselves were holding other men and women in bondage? They could not, of course. The ideas of the American Revolution — individualism, natural rights and free markets — led logically to agitation for the extension of civil and political rights to those who had been excluded from liberty, as they were from power — notably slaves, serfs and women.

Those ideas manifested themselves elsewhere, whether with the Royal Navy shutting down the slave trade, or Tsar Alexander II liberating serfs.  He used his platform to offer Huffington Post types an argument they probably don't often encounter.

What Locke, Garrison, Douglass and many others were fighting for is the ethical basis of libertarianism, a respect for the dignity and worth of every individual. This is expressed in the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s dictum that each person is to be treated not merely as a means but as an end in himself.

Black history is American history, a story of oppression and liberation rooted in the libertarian idea of individual rights. Much of the progress we have made in the United States has involved extending the promises of the Declaration of Independence — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — to more and more people. The emphasis on the individual mind in the Enlightenment, the individualist nature of market capitalism and the demand for individual rights that inspired the American Revolution naturally led people to think more carefully about the nature of the individual and gradually to recognize that the dignity of individual rights should be extended to all.

The struggle for freedom is never finished. Today libertarians work for economic freedom that would mean more growth and more jobs, for the freedom for all families to choose better schools for their children, for an end to the counterproductive war on drugs and for criminal justice reform. Respect for the dignity of each person is the foundation of moral and social progress.

Free the People contributor Tahmineh Dehbozorgi also offers a short take candidate.  "Slavery in the Western Hemisphere predates the founding of the American colonies, but it didn’t last long once we arrived. That’s something all Americans should agree is worth celebrating."  Her post otherwise reinforces and extends Mr Boaz's argument and is worth your time reading.

Unfortunately, Transgressive Juneteenth crowds out the new birth of freedom, to the dismay of Glenn Loury.  "The irony of these Juneteenth shootings is that the black kids are celebrating their freedom while misusing it."  Chicago, for example, had another mostly peaceful weekend, with a party gone wrong in suburban Willowbrook getting a lot of attention.  "Despite strict gun laws, the Chicago area saw three mass shootings during celebrations of Juneteenth, a holiday that recognizes the day the last slaves were freed in the South."  That Willowbrook gathering might have been a regular weekend kids hanging out, but the way in which the mixing and mingling went sour is instructive.

What started as a peaceful party began to turn violent shortly after midnight. There were a couple of fights between young women but police do not believe that was related to the gunfire. Local police were on hand before the shooting occurred to keep the peace but were called away to break up a nearby fight. When they were gone, chaos erupted.

“Since Juneteenth has come about, we’ve been celebrating,” resident Nayetta Reed told The Chicago Sun-Times. “And usually the sheriffs are out here with us. It’s very controlled, it’s peaceful. I don’t know what happened. I really don’t know what happened last night. It just went left.”

I'll get to the symbolism of going left later as well.  Elsewhere in Chicago, it was honor culture meets sexual transgressivity.

While shootings and murders get most of the attention in Chicago – the incident also underscored another behavior that’s experiencing a rapid rise: Disrespect directed at those whose job is to serve and protect.

As officers tried to disperse the large crowd, video from the scene showed several women dancing in front of police cars.

One woman, dressed in hot pink, spreads her legs across the pavement and begins gyrating her body in the headlights of the squad car as officers look on. A second woman joins in the twerking as some in the crowd cheer.

That's part of what going left looks like.

“It started as the occasional ‘F-U’ and name calling but has now evolved to this and more,” recently retired Chicago police lieutenant John Garrido told WGN Investigates. “There is no accountability, nobody goes to jail and their actions are protected by a mayor who coddles and justifies their behavior.”

In Milwaukee, Juneteenth has been a community celebration since 1971 (and has potential to piggyback with a weekend ethnic festival in the manner of the German, Irish, Italian, or Polish events) and now has a street parade, and then some sort of spat between young women led to shots exchanged.

Six teenagers — including four minors — were shot and wounded Monday afternoon near where Milwaukee's Juneteenth celebration had just wrapped up, according to the Milwaukee Police Department.

The shooting happened around 4:20 p.m. directly outside Greater Philadelphia Church of God in Christ, 2947 N. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, according to witnesses and a Facebook Live video taken by a bystander in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.

Police said the victims were four girls who are ages 14, 16, 17 and 18, and two boys who are 17 and 19. They were taken to a hospital for treatment of non-fatal injuries.

Milwaukee Police said their preliminary investigation revealed the shooting may have stemmed from a fight between multiple girls on MLK Drive when suspects fired several shots.

That story dismayed staffers of Milwaukee's radio station WGKB The Truth ("We are 101.7 The Truth, an audio platform that embraces Milwaukee’s black community") who had hoped to share a happy story on their AM radio partner WTMJ about Miss Juneteenth handing out candy to the kids and instead had to report on the crime scene tape.

The police chief, Jeffrey Norman, offers sound advice.

Norman said it will take a village to fix the violence problem.

"Milwaukee, what's going on with our children?" Norman said. "Parents, guardians, elders, we need to engage and ensure that this violence that our children are bringing to these streets cease. No handgun, no weapon of destruction should be in the hands of our young ones. It's important that all of us do something."

"This is not a Milwaukee Police Department thing. Not the mayor's thing. Not just only community organizers," Norman said. "It's a 'us' thing. ... We need you, all of you to be part of this effort to make our city safer."

Implicitly, he's recognizing that the village ought not combine all the redeeming features of a hippie commune and a trailer park.  Note that the scrap took place outside a church.  No church, no abolition movement and no civil rights movement in the forms we understand them.

You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy.

Rather than conceal that monument, its image, and its story, ought be part of any Juneteenth sermons.

In Chicago, on the other hand, it's all somebody else's fault.

[Mayor Brandon Johnson] was also asked about the dozens of shootings this weekend at a news conference Monday. Johnson reverted to generalized themes about overcoming decades of disinvestment and the scars of police torture when asked what his administration was doing to combat crime.

Disinvested? By whom? What Illinois's punitive taxation of business starts, Chicago's soft on crime prosecutors finishes.  But so it is when things turn left.  Let's return to Mr Qualls's column.

There is a major schism brewing in our nation — the growing trend of black Americans choosing to celebrate Juneteenth in lieu of the 4th of July holiday. In our increasingly polarized nation, many appear to have forgotten that proud Americans may actually celebrate both.

Unfortunately, we have elected officials that have used their platforms to encourage disunity. In July 2021 Rep. Maxine Waters proclaimed that the Declaration of Independence was only for white men. That same year Rep. Cori Bush promoted the idea of celebrating Juneteenth instead of the July 4th holiday.

What both pols fail to understand is that without the Declaration of Independence, there would be no Juneteenth. And there would be no Juneteenth without the sacrifice of 350,000 white men of the Union Army from non-slave-holding states that died in the Civil War that led to the Emancipation Proclamation.

More to the point, Brandon Johnson, or Maxine Waters, or Cori Bush, would rather posture about the symbolism and push their transgressive Juneteenth than, oh, do something for the benefit of their constituents.

There's a symbiosis between desperate people who like having a ward-heeler "fighting for them" and a ward-heeler who mau-maus the rest of the polity about the continued parlous condition of his or her constituents.  A ward-heeler cannot call out the constituents for engaging in self-destructive behavior, nor get re-elected in a district in which constituents discover, or re-discover bourgeois habits.  Better to have constituents rendered helpless by years of Democratic policies.  That's how Gwen and Bobby and John and Maxine achieve seniority in the Democratic caucus.

(That's from an older post, some of those Members of Congress have faced the final recall since.)

Props to Chief Norman for doing the right thing, even at the risk of being mau-maued for victim blaming.