June 24, 2024

The Weekly, June 24, 2024

Hi all,

Last Wednesday was Juneteenth. If you are unfamiliar with the holiday or wish to learn more, I’d highly recommend watching this exceptional documentary about the holiday made by Rasool Berry and Our Daily Bread:

One of the predictable but still unpleasant elements of social media last week was the mockery of Juneteenth happening amongst various conservatives accounts.

I’m not going to link all of it, but this one is representative:

Knowles writes for The Daily Wire and has also spoken at past National Conservatism events, so he’s not a marginal figure.

What is striking about the mockery of Juneteenth is that Juneteenth is actually a celebration of America coming closer to her ideals, a celebration of the end of one of the greatest betrayals of our ideals in our history. When Dr. King talked about America writing a check only for Afro-Americans to attempt to cash it and be told “insufficient funds,” he’s making a point very much related to what we are celebrating on Juneteenth: If America’s ideals are actually true, then they’re for Afro-Americans as much as they are white Americans. If those ideals are not lived up to with regard to Afro-Americans, it casts doubt on the whole project.

So if you care about the American project of democratic self-governance under God, celebrating Juneteenth should be easy. It’s not an alternative to July 4, but an extension of it—a reminder both that early 4th of July celebrations lacked something and yet also that some of the injustices that blighted those celebrations have been addressed. Addressed imperfectly, certainly, but still addressed in a real way. And therefore it is also a call to do as Eliot advised, to consider the future and past with equal mind, recognizing both the goodness of the past we still celebrate and recognizing its imperfections and the opportunities we have to honor the past by further realizing its promises. In short, Juneteenth is a deeply American holiday.

I think this is a notable point because the new right will often claim that what drives their response to issues of race in recent years is not their own racial prejudice, but is rather their concern with specific theories or ideas regarding race in America. They’ll say the issue is with critical race theory or with “anti-white racism,” and that’s the problem. These same folks will then offer assurances that they are concerned by racial prejudice of all sorts because racial prejudice is wrong.

And then we come to Juneteenth—a holiday that marks something that anyone who cares about racial injustice should happily mark as a great day in our nation’s history and nation’s life. Do these people, people like Knowles and the other young new right media personalities like him, respond differently to Juneteenth?

No. They do not.

Even here they ridicule and mock. And, I have to ask, what kind of person must one be to mock a holiday celebrating the emancipation of Afro-Americans and the ending of American chattel slavery? And what kind of person will one become over time if one participates in such joking? And what kind of movement will arise out of individuals shaped in such ways?

I’m a strong enough believer in virtue ethics to believe that patterns of ridiculing and mocking good things will shape you in bad ways.

Books

I’m reading Nellie Bowles’s new book now as well as picking up Picard’s World of Silence after reading about it in Sacasas’s newsletter. The Bowles is interesting at points, but Bowles strikes me as the sort of writer who is genuinely amusing and clever and, for that precise reason, needs an editor who will not allow them to coast on being amusing and clever. The book could have been much more, but so far it is mostly an amusing writer talking about how crazy the people she used to work with are. And, sure, I can be here for a book like that. But when a writer and their topic can potentially be something greater, settling for “amusing and clever memoir” feels a little disappointing.

Articles

Mark Lilla on Deneen, Ahmari, and Vermeule

Kevin Vallier on the integralists

Justin Giboney on Juneteenth

John Shelton on Reaganite fusionism

Freddie deBoer on how publishing works

Gray Sutanto on Bavinck and racism

Elsewhere

Y’all liked the whiskey smash. I got more emails about that than any other food thing I’ve ever shared. I’m going to switch things up though this week.

If you’re looking for a great weeknight meal for a family, check this out:

Thanks for reading!

Under the Mercy,
~Jake