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.
Ah, just like Easter, Christmas, Ramadan, Fat Tuesday, Valentine's Day, Purim, Holi, Passover, Cinco De Mayo, D-Day, etc. etc. etc.
Observances regularly don't give you a clue what they are about. Like, if you weren't already aware about Martin Luther King, Jr. day, you'd have to Google it to know what's up. Same with Rosh Hashana. Or Eid. I think you might be getting stuck on something that is demonstrably not a unique phenomena and it's reading a little like there's something about Juneteenth itself that's bothering you.
What you have just told me is a FEATURE. Not a BUG.
I'm very GOOD with people "not immediately knowing." I like that. It forces them to learn about my people and culture.
"Juneteenth" makes you step in and perhaps get a little uncomfortable, like, hmm weird little Black-sounding phrase?
"Emancipation Day" frees (lol) you from engaging, you can just sort of take on the same ol same ol story, which, I imagine for many people starts with Abraham Lincoln and not Black people.
I had this conversation with a group of people today and literally not one of them knew its true origin and the word never propelled them to look into it further. They just assumed (correctly) that someone came up with the name because it’s in June and the nineTEENTH day, but they didn’t realize the term was actually used long ago.
So take from that anecdote what you will, but I’ll admit the name kind of has a modern sound and I don’t think it spurs the kind of curiosity that you hope it does.
Also, FWIW, the name “Emancipation Day” is also a commonly used name for the holiday, though not as common as Juneteenth.
I didn't realize "Juneteenth" was considered "Black-sounding" by some people. Juneteenth is a pretty culturally mainstream term (being a national holiday). And forming new words using contractions doesn't seem like a typically Black-person thing to do.
I associate the term with Black people, not because of how it sounds, but because I know what it means and know about it's origin among formerly-enslaved Black communities.
Maybe you mainly heard it said by black people, so it just sounds black to you? Whereas someone who heard about it on Twitter in 2015 wouldn't have made the same subconscious association, even if it's explicitly about celebrating freeing black people from slavery.
Oh, no. It sounds black because it is black. Check the history. "Juneteenth" the term was absolutely invented by black folks. I'm just finding it interesting that it "doesn't sound black to others."
I mean, I know that. I'm thinking of why it doesn't "sound black" to others but it does to you. Words are just words. They don't have inherent qualities that can't change or are the same to those who haven't heard the word before.
Yeah, I mean I know this can be a feather-ruffling point but (esp at my age) there's something wild about the Black slang -> "mainstream cool" slang pipeline that's ubiquitous and feels instant. :)
"Emancipation Day" is way too ambiguous in the US because there are already several other days that are called "Emancipation Day" in various states [1].
They mostly all have something to do with the ending of slavery but it is different things in different states. For example in Massachusetts it is on July 8th and commemorates slavery being found to be legally unenforceable there under in a 1783 decision.
Also, if Serbia has some holidays that I can't recognize when I read them from a calendar, should Serbia change the names of them for me? Or is it only the words that black Americans use that aren't real when random people don't recognize them?
I mean... you could just look it up, if you didn't know. Plenty of places have obscurely-named holidays (for instance, a number of countries have Whit Monday as a holiday; good luck figuring out what _that_ is from the name...)
This attitude is my problem with this day. If this is a day celebrating the nation and how we overcame the evil of slavery to create something better, emancipating millions of fellow Americans, I’m for it.
If this is a federal holiday to “center blackness” and “put our attention on black folk”, then that’s state sanctioned racial factionalism and perpetuates an arrogant race centrism that’s already all too prevalent among some segments of black Americans. That I will not celebrate.
We should be creating a society that celebrates Americans, regardless of their skin color. Emancipation day is a great thing, over half a million Americans (many white) died to correct an evil that denied freedom to millions of our fellow Americans - it’s a tragedy so many had to die, but their sacrifice made a better country for all of us.
Yeah, the problem is that we don’t have a society like that and the only way white people know how to do that is to erase the contributions of Black people AFTER they’ve stolen everything from us and literally treated us as property. So excuse me if we think it’s okay to center Blackness for a month and a day when white folks (which is what you are even if you aren’t) are centered the rest of the year.
Do you want people to associate AAVE with the term? I'm not quite finding the right term but it seems "unprofessional", in a sense.
It would be like advocating for Christmas Day to be formally recognised as "Chrisso" or "Chrissie" here in Australia. Yeah we all informally call it that, but it would be embarrassing to codify it.
I do, and this is a far bigger discussion than I can get into here -- but it's about respecting/understanding Black American cultural contributions ..
.. which is hard because when you start making accounts of them you begin to realize how universal and yet unrecognized so many of our contributions are.
It doesn't help that, in the fervour to amplify black contributions, there is a lot of embellishment, appropriation, and even outright lies, often at the expense of White pioneers. I know we won't agree on this point, yourself clearly being a proud black man and myself a proud White man, but that is the sense that I have around this topic now. If I'm being frank, I find that I am conditioned at this point to treat these claims with a great amount of suspicion, as they often appear to be motivated more so by racial interests than historical accuracy.
Can you please, in order to add effectively to the conversation, provide some links to the contributions of Black people that have been embellished, appropriated, and fabricated at the expense of white pioneers, please?
Theres no straw man arugement here. The fact is everything is on the internet. Telling someone their ignorant because its on the internet is a half truth. Its like saying I graduated from Harvard and therefore I had the best education money could buy and theres no way i'm ignorant. The straw was the ignorant comment and not providing what it is why it should be celebrated by Americans.
Nah it’s really easy to understand Juneteenth if you just google it. Let’s not argue on the fringes of the subject and claim it applies here. Ignorant people always have excuses for why it’s too hard to become educated on a simple subject.
I don't care enough to waste my time learning about America's latest attempt at making themselves feel better about their barbaric cultural history.
I'm simply commenting that "emanicipation day" is much clearer than "Juneteenth" - whether that's a good thing or not I have no opinion on as it has nothing to do with me.
I get that you're reasonably new here, but we need you to understand that this style of commenting on Hacker News is unacceptable. It's not what the site is for and it destroys what it is for. Please read and observe the guidelines, particularly these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
By people in a small community in Texas and nowhere else. No one elsewhere heard of this thing till now. Now everyone pretends it's a big deal but it was strictly a local event there. You never heard of it till Biden's group brought it up. I bet I'm older than you (the reader). I never heard of this till Biden brought it up.
This holiday is beyond stupid when you consider that the guy who freed the slaves, Abraham Lincoln, doesn't have a Federal holiday where one gets the day off.
EDIT: Now that I've had my time for my "shower thoughts": Why is there no national holiday for the American Indian? They were here first. Mistreated and kicked out of the areas they occuplied. A wonderful culture with a wonderful history but no mention anywhere on the calendar?
> I bet I'm older than you (the reader). I never heard of this till Biden brought it up.
I'm in my mid-50s, maybe you are older than me. It's something I had heard about in the 2015-2020 timeframe. I'm white as fuck, but being online meant I saw tweet threads or short explainers about it for a few years. I didn't meet folks who celebrated it, but when I asked around to Black folks I knew they were like, "Yeah, it's a thing."
So I suspect that the holiday gained momentum among Black Americans and spread out from Texas sometime prior to me hearing about it, perhaps with the rise of social media, and then us folks who are out of the loop started hearing about it later. (Either through our own social media intake or through the declaration of a federal holiday.)
> This holiday is beyond stupid when you consider that the guy who freed the slaves, Abraham Lincoln, doesn't have a Federal holiday where one gets the day off.
American & Western European chattel slavery (or perhaps more accurately, western christianity-driven chattel slavery) is uniquely barbaric historically.
The wide-scale dehumanization on a racial basis has no precedent historically.
Imperialist Christianity, of which the modern US continues to suffer from (even if it's a secular version), is uniquely brutal and violent.
> I don't care enough to waste my time learning about America's latest attempt at making themselves feel better about their barbaric cultural history.
jesus christ you people are so thick:
> Early Juneteenth celebrations date back to 1866, at first involving church-centered community gatherings in Texas. They spread across the South among newly freed African-Americans and their descendants and became more commercialized in the 1920s and 1930s, often centering on a food festival.
just because you've never heard of it doesn't mean it's not real.
> just because you've never heard of it doesn't mean it's not real.
This style of commenting is not allowed on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. It's a clear breach of the guidelines that ask us to avoid swipes and name-calling.
We've had to ask you several times to correct this kind of conduct here. If it keeps up, we'll have to ban the account.
Please quit this pointless war. Yes, anyone who is banned can create a new account. That's always been the case and we don't even try to prevent it. We just keep upholding the guidelines regardless. Consider that maybe it's not the big win you think it is, to be one of the few people making an effort to use a website in defiant opposition to its intended use, when it's only a place people want to frequent because others put their efforts into making it function well.
I'm gonna repeat for the second time to you: you let comments that are blatant dog whistles stand and you respond to those that break rules of decorum. It's pretty simple to understand - either moderate the hate speech yourself or let people respond to it as it should be responded to: vociferously.
Edit:
> Please quit this pointless war
Arguing with trolls and bigots is as pointless as anything else in life but it's certainly much more pointed than moderating a tech forum to maintain decorum.
Edit 2:
Links because apparently I'm deflecting and not actually pointing out a serious pathology with this site and its moderation that's been obvious for years
It's deeply unhelpful to try and discuss something as complicated as slavery if you insist on whitewashing it as a simple, binary case of good and bad.
Of those comments, one of them would be killed by now if you'd just used the site's functionality as intended and flagged it.
Without expertise on the topic (and I am Australian, I don't have deep expertise on these topics, and it doesn't seem like other readers do either), the merit of those comments seem like a question of historical accuracy. If there's a way in which the content of these comments breach the guidelines (and no, the guidelines don't permit people to, say, support fascism or genocide as long as they're polite about it as it's been facetiously put in the past; anything that is unkind or abusive or oppressive to other people is against the guidelines here), you or anyone can explain that in a reply or an email to us. We understand that sometimes comments break the guidelines in ways that aren't obvious at face value (as you put it "dog whistles"), and in these cases people can, point this out in comments or emails to us. Positive contributors to HN do this all the time. Nobody has done that in this case, but you're welcome to do so, now or in any other similar situation.
Edit: I was reflecting as I took a walk that this discussion is almost a mirror image of one I had about a week ago with a user who seems to be on the other side of the political spectrum. Like you, their belief was that HN's discourse and moderation is biased against their political persuasion, and that this entitles them to disregard the guidelines and engage in battle against what they perceive as malevolent actors on the site. We've seen this effect forever here: the more strongly someone is focused on a particular ideological issue, the more keenly they notice anything that breaches their sensibilities about that topic. Dang has written about it and cited examples of it many times over the years:
The truth is we don't – and can't moderate in support of any particular ideological agenda. We just don't have time to pore through all the comments and manoeuvre things in a way that pushes things one way or another. All we can do is respond to the bad stuff we see, which we can only do if people use the site's feedback mechanisms to alert us to things that need our intervention.
> All we can do is respond to the bad stuff we see, which we can only do if people use the site's feedback mechanisms to alert us to things that need our intervention.
....
> Of those comments, one of them would be killed by now if you'd just used the site's functionality as intended and flagged it.
Am I taking crazy pills? I directly linked you to both comments, you concede one of them crossed a line, and yet this morning I wake up and they're both still live simply because I didn't hit a specific button?
And no I'm not gonna hit the button. Because my point isn't actually about political bias or whatever - it's that you people are weirdo hall monitors that tone police instead of actually encourage discourse (as I've said many times now in this thread, despite your claims that I'm complaining about bias).
It's not about tone it's about substance. When your comments are all laced with indignation, the substance is lost. I'm actually pleading with you to engage in discourse here. I'm telling you that I (and, evidently, many others in this community), aren't expert enough in this specific topic to see how these comments are so egregious (rather than just wrong, which is not a guidelines breach). I did some enquiries of my own about the topics, and sure, I picked up some further details. But that's not enough to me to unilaterally kill these comments, and after all that's not the point. You're expecting us to moderate a particular way about topics you have particular knowledge about and particularly strong feelings about. That's not something we can ever do, no matter the topic or the side. This is a perfect example of why it matters to optimise for substance over indignation. You could simply respond with opposing evidence, and educate other readers, me included. That's what we most want here.
> You're expecting us to moderate a particular way about topics you have particular knowledge about and particularly strong feelings about. That's not something we can ever do, no matter the topic or the side. This is a perfect example of why it matters to optimise for substance over indignation.
This is such a weird false-dichotomy you're portraying. No one is expecting you to weigh in on arcane/abstruse things. This is about a current holiday in America that commemorates freeing of slaves ~150 years ago, not slavery in the Mycenaean civilization of 1100BCE.
You said you're not American - ok then maybe you should've stayed out of the thread entirely? But since you didn't, then you should realize it is your responsibility to educate yourself. Like just plain and simple: can you imagine a police officer policing a foreign people being unaware of their history/culture/etc?
Like can you imagine the same thread about mistreatment of aboriginals in AU - would you similarly blithely claim ignorance? Indifference?
What I keep saying is that my job is not to adjudicate on content correctness, it's to uphold the guidelines, and the guidelines are designed to optimise discussions for substance and avoid ragey flamewars.
The whole reason we're having this discussion is that you expressed your points – which I acknowledged were valid and valuable – in inflammatory ways. And ever since you've been rejecting my appeals to you to avoid inflammatory commenting, by claiming that other comments are so egregious that the guidelines shouldn't apply to you.
I'm telling you that it's not obvious how those comments are so egregious. Other community members haven't called them out as egregious. They didn't set off flamewars. I've acknowledged that dog-whistles exist and sometimes comments can be egregious in ways that aren't immediately obvious, and asked for you to explain how these ones are egregious, and you keep refusing. I'm not going to be goaded or shamed into acting on comments on the basis that "it should be obvious". We can't operate a site like that.
The egregiousness of other comments doesn't excuse you from observing the guidelines. That's a very well established norm here.
> by claiming that other comments are so egregious that the guidelines shouldn't apply to you.
no man i keep claiming the same thing over and over: that you have done nothing about any other comment in this thread except mine. i've literally said this same thing like 5 times. and what's happening is you keep reasserting some kind of lattitude to ignore them.
> I'm not going to be goaded or shamed into acting on comments on the basis that "it should be obvious". We can't operate a site like that.
you can't have your cake and eat it too: if my comments are obvious enough given a particular value system that you can scold and censure me, then there can be plenty of others that are just as obvious.
edit:
> rather than insisting that you are above the guidelines... take responsibility for your own conduct
please point out for me (by using links) where i didn't "take responsibility"? at multiple points i admitted to being sarcastic/flippant. how would you like me to further take responsibility? would you like me to apologize to those people? would you like me to delete my comment so that they continue fly under the radar? would you like me to commit hari-kari?
You are only being held to account according to the guidelines, which apply equally to everyone. I'm telling you that I'm willing to act on other comments when it's clear how they breach the guidelines, but we need you to play your role as a citizen of this site who uses the mechanisms available to everyone, rather than insisting that you are above the guidelines and refusing to use the mechanisms we offer. Please stop fixating on other comments and take responsibility for your own conduct and role in making this site what you expect it to be.
Edit: To be clear, the reason your comments were acted on is that they were flagged and commented on by other community members. We act mostly on what we're alerted to, which is why I keep telling you that we need you to alert us to things if you want them acted upon (and not just as a way of deflecting from the conduct you're being called out for). It's also false that we hadn't acted on other comments in the subthread.
You posted several comments in this thread that stirred up controversy and took the discussion away from the kind of discussion we would hope for on a sensitive topic like this. The guidelines ask us to avoid this, and other comments of yours in other threads have also been inflammatory. Please make an effort to observe the guidelines, particularly these ones:
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
The western, Christian values explicitly had slavery in them. The slave owners were Christian. I don't really see how religion has to do with the abolishment of race-based slavery, sadly.
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart.
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.