On Monday, we were regaled nationwide with a cacophony of warbling about Juneteenth, which is a new federal holiday commemorating the day in 1865 that Union troops landed at Galveston to begin enforcing the Emancipation Proclamation and ending slavery in Texas. Juneteenth has been recognized in Texas for a long time; it was the Biden administration, in its infinite rush to pander to its most loyal voting bloc, that felt compelled to take things national.
And, actually, there’s nothing wrong with that. As Jeffrey Lord wrote here at The American Spectator on Tuesday, the only thing really missing in these Juneteenth pronouncements from our betters at Team Biden is a recognition and mea culpa from the Democrat Party for its two centuries of racism, slavery, and segregation. If slavery were our national original sin (it wasn’t — slavery was a defining characteristic of human societal organization up until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and it was the industrial capitalism so many on the Left decry that offered a better, and more moral, way to generate economic production), then Democrats are our original sinners. (READ MORE: The Juneteenth Hypocrisy of Biden and Obama)
And they’re never willing, it seems, to be held accountable for that. Wonder why.
Accountability ought to be part of the recognition of Juneteenth.
And here’s the thing: Despite the stupid insistence by the Democrats that “the parties switched sides” after the civil rights era — and so it’s Republicans who ought to be contrite about the country’s past racism — there is very little accountability that Republicans owe for the plight of the people whose ancestors were freed by the GOP’s founder, President Abraham Lincoln, and the military he dispatched to enforce it.
It’s coming up on 170 years on from the end of slavery in America. It’s coming up on 60 years since the last of the Jim Crow laws were put to bed. And most American black people live in jurisdictions that are governed by Democrats — guess not much has changed, right? — and specifically by black Democrats.
How’s that going? Well, here was Chicago over the weekend:
Here was Los Angeles:
A #McDonalds in Los Angeles gets looted with ruckus inside, reportedly on Juneteenth. pic.twitter.com/cr2nEmntqu
— Insider Times (@Insider_Times) June 20, 2023
And here was St. Louis:
St. Louis police Chief Robert Tracy said at a news conference that the department is working hard to concentrate patrols and crack down on downtown mayhem, but Sunday’s shooting was a setback.https://t.co/MTMg9ZtLT8
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch (@stltoday) June 20, 2023
There were incidents all over the country involving either Juneteenth celebrations or gatherings on the eve of the holiday.
There is a sickness in the black community in this country that is more than just par for the course of general societal degredation. Other racial and ethnic communities are not collapsing as badly as this:
Never forget how people in California twerked on an ambulance as EMTs responded to a fatal shooting at a Juneteenth event two years ago. I feel secondhand embarrassment.
— Ada Lluch ???????? (@ada_lluch) June 20, 2023
Or this:
Police are searching for a suspect that went on a series of knife attacks throughout New York City subway stations that left three women injuredhttps://t.co/RaL2RdXEtO
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) June 19, 2023
Meanwhile, we have the NAACP issuing “travel warnings” about states like Florida and Louisiana because their legislatures are passing anti-woke bills.
In Louisiana, the local NAACP in Baton Rouge gave a “Presidents Award” to a drug dealer up on second-degree murder charges, and the head of the organization publicly defended the decision and claimed he’d be happy to give the drug dealer another award when he gets out of jail. But it’s Republicans who are the problem — despite Baton Rouge being a majority-black city run by a black Democrat mayor since 2005. It used to be a relatively safe city; now, it’s one of the 10 worst shooting galleries in America.
Nine of them are run by Democrats, and almost all of the mayors of which are black.
Why hasn’t the black community flourished under self-governance so many years after Emancipation and the end of Jim Crow? Blacks were never slaves in Detroit or Philadelphia or Newark; in fact, when the last Republican mayor of Detroit left office in the early 1960s, the city was the richest in the world.
And its black community was the richest black community in the world.
Look at it now.
No one talks about this.
Instead, we get nonstop discussions of racism, when everyone knows that the tribulations of slavery and segregation have been more than canceled — and staggering amounts of blood and treasure spent in an effort to remedy them — but when “racism” has nothing to do with the awful state of black communities across America.
Black-on-black crime is an epidemic rivaling that of the most wretched of Third World countries, and it’s literally tearing those communities apart. And the leaders have sided with the criminals.
That’s not an opinion. It’s an obvious fact. It gets denied right up to the point when it’s extolled as necessary. Because George Floyd wasn’t a violent career criminal — he was a saint.
Nothing will get better until the anti-leadership in that community is called out and replaced. Republicans can’t fix it. White people can’t fix it. Nobody can fix it other than black people in those communities run by the NAACPs of the world. And more and more, black families capable of getting out are getting out as fast as they can.
So are the businesses. There’s only so much looting and mayhem anyone can withstand before it’s time to go.
So this Juneteenth, and next, and all the rest for the foreseeable future, ought to be spent demanding that the suffering and sacrifice of those who didn’t have what modern Americans have now after all the work put in to remedy that unjust past actually means something.
That the black community’s leadership actually assists in healing. In improvement. In combating the barbarism and degradation we see every day.
Until some measure of that commitment is in evidence, this is all just empty posturing. And the rest of us have had enough of the lectures and hectoring.