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JUNETEENTH
Why Do White People Keep Centering Themselves in Juneteenth Celebration?
Some struggle to accept a day honoring Black liberation
Juneteenth is a holiday celebrating Black Americans’ freedom. However, there are some White people who must have missed the memo because they’ve opted to center themselves rather than taking a moment to honor enslaved people and their descendants. For instance, in Greenville, South Carolina, a Juneteenth flier advertising a local celebration featured two White models, a man and a woman, with the tagline, “an upstate celebration of freedom, love, and unity,” a move that many Black people slammed as inappropriate. When pressed about why the Juneteenth Mega Fest organizers depicted two White people in their advertisement, “Rueben Hays, the organizer of this year’s event and founder and CEO of Juneteenth GVL Mega Fest,” said, “‘We did not want to make this exclusively Black.” The problem is organizers failed to include any Black models; this isn’t an illustration of diversity, it’s erasure.
A Juneteenth flier featuring only White people is a far cry from inclusivity. Furthermore, anyone who understands Black American history would understand just how inappropriate it is to center White people in a Juneteenth celebration. Slavery was a brutal form of race-based human…
