On Juneteenth

by Annette Gordon-Reed

Empowered Black people made the intangible benefits derived from Whiteness less valuable.

“One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

People want the individuals from the past they admire to be “right” on the question of race—no matter how wrong they actually were—so that admiring such people poses no problem. The difficulty is that not many European-Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were what we would consider to be “right” on the question of race, which, at a minimum, requires believing in the equal humanity of African Americans.

One of the tests of a great song or poem—any work of art, really—is its capacity to touch different people in different ways across time.