The Daily: 19 June 2023

Juneteenth

Today is Juneteenth. Specifically, today is the second anniversary of Juneteenth becoming a federal holiday and the 158th anniversary of the reading of General Order No. 3 by Union Army general Gordon Granger. This was the order which served as the Texas version of the Emancipation Proclamation, a full two years after President Lincoln and the federal government (such as it was) freed all slaves. It was therefore the official grant of freedom to Texan slaves, some of the last people to be legally enslaved in this country. The celebration of this holiday began as early as the late 1860s in Galveston, Texas, and has spread outward to every state in the US and, more recently, to Mexico, where descendants of Black Seminoles honor their ancestors’ flight from slavery. 

Juneteenth celebrates freedom for the formerly enslaved, but it is also a day to celebrate African-American arts and culture more generally, particularly food and music. As this holiday has Texan roots, rodeo is often a prominent feature, as are barbecues and food trucks hawking everything from Cajun shrimp to collard greens. But of course, the primary focus is on the historical fact of enslavement and the deep trauma it has left on our country. While slavery has existed in one form or another for as long as some humans have been forcing others to do labor that benefits the enforcer and not the laborer, the peculiar institution that built American wealth was almost unique in basing legal status on a new class of ‘race’ based on the skin color of one’s ancestors. So this day marks the end of legally enforcing that status, though it also highlights just how little progress we’ve made in ending the existence of race-based status. In fact, Texas in the 1860s might have been more racially progressive than much of ‘progressive’ New England is today.

I’ve had to bear witness to some truly horrible comments on the fact that my employer is closed today. Some came from customers who were largely expressing irritation at inconvenience, though I don’t recall a similar level of grousing about Memorial Day. I have tried to respond in bright and positive fashion. At worst, I have said that, with all the work I still have in the garden, I appreciate the three-day weekend. But in my better moments, I have painted a picture of the joy of being freed and the nearly involuntary need to celebrate freedom. We celebrate the beginning of the war for freedom from monarchical rule. Why is this any different?

However, the hardest moments have come from my co-workers and my boss. I don’t want to lose my new job, but I also don’t want to remain silent. I confess to not being a very good anti-racist these last few days. I have scowled quite a lot, but not said as much as I should have. Mostly this is because I did not expect this from grown humans in 21st century urban New England and truly had no response. Something would be said and it would be so outrageously dumbfounding that all I could do in the moment was blink and stare. I know I made people uncomfortable because there were mumbled retractions, but I think these came more because they felt they had insulted me personally (and one should never antagonize the witch), not because they recognized that what they were saying was patently and disgustingly racist.

And the thing is, they don’t know they are being racist. They are that ignorant. And it can’t be blamed on the parochial New England world view (which is increasingly insalubrious in MAGA-friendly ways). I work in a business that, yes, serves many Vermont natives, but there are also many from outside this culture even on staff. My employer is historically associated with the local military college, Norwich University, which, yes, may be historically white and insular in the way of New England, but is certainly not that way now. Many of our customers are not even from this country, and they would have been slaves if they came to these shores just a few generations ago. Furthermore, my town is a blue-collar crafting economy with many people migrating here in the late 19th century to quarry and sculpt the granites and marbles of the Green Mountains. Most were not white as defined by the 19th century elites who invented the concept. In fact, those Vermonters with darker skin who come through our doors every day undoubtedly have ancestors who were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. So how do people of any skin color in this culture remain so blind? It seems a willful choice to me — making it all the more repulsive.

It is also a foul stain on education in this country and an indication of just how successful the bigoted right take-over of school boards has been at keeping actual history (among other realities) out of the classroom. There is a recent high school grad doing summer work for my employer right now. He graduated early and with honors, at the top of his class, in one of the best schools in Vermont. I have not heard him denigrating Juneteenth specifically, though this might be because we were working in separate offices this past week. But here is a mark of how ahistorical his knowledge is. And mind you, this is the best that Vermont has to offer.

We were talking about incomprehensible place names. Incomprehensible from our vantage point anyway. As an illustration, I said that there weren’t any Delaware Indians anywhere near Delaware when Delaware was named nor even east of the Mississippi River since the 19th century. His first response was surprise that Delaware was named for a Native nation. But then he asked, ‘Well, where did they go?’. I said that I thought that those few who remained lived in Kansas or Wyoming or some such sparsely populated prairie region. He then asked why they would have done that. I blinked a couple seconds, sure he was making a tasteless joke, but then realized he actually did not know. He did not know our white settler ancestors forced the Delaware to leave. First, we forced them to migrate over the Appalachian Mountains into Ohio and then, only a few generations later, we forcibly removed them from those ceded treaty lands and forced them to march off to the dry interior of this continent, places that were completely bewildering to coastal woodlands peoples. He absorbed this for all of three seconds and then rationalized away the rupture we caused by saying ‘Well, they had horses. It wasn’t that bad’. I couldn’t respond to this except to say that I seriously doubted that our government gave them horses.

How could a well-educated teenager, fresh from the rigors of textbooks and tests, not know this essential chapter in US history? The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized that I’m not sure I learned it in school either. I might blame this on 20th century parochial school and then Indiana (which is about the most insultingly incomprehensible place name there is), but I don’t know that we had substantially different textbooks from any other school districts. No, I was fortunate in that I had friends who taught me the reality of the past, and I was also sensitized at a very young age to the enormous lacunae in history books by all the missing female pronouns. I came to my level of understanding independent of and, to a great degree in spite of, formal education. And apparently, this situation has not improved in the four intervening decades.

To the point that a young white man in Vermont does not know that his history includes forcibly ripping the original inhabitants of his homeland out of their lives — and then, to add insult to injury, naming our surroundings after the ghosts of the peoples we annihilated. To the point that a middle-aged woman in Vermont says it’s stupid to be closed on Juneteenth because this isn’t a real holiday — implying that reality and culture only belong to people with her own skin tone. To the point that we don’t understand the atrocities that built this country and so have no remedy for the wounds, don’t even know that those wounds are fresh and ongoing and gouged all the deeper by the willful ignorance that passes for education in our country.

I am a little sickened today on my day off. I would ask pardon from all those who have been wronged by my culture. Only I don’t know that I deserve it. And I know this culture doesn’t. So I am working in the garden, working to build up healthy relationship to what is here now and what has been before. And I have written these words, hoping that they might reach a few and reveal all the holes in their knowledge of themselves and their history. But that’s a thin hope.

Be better if I had a rodeo to offer… but even that… most white people assume that rodeo is a white people thing… and it’s just… not.

Look it up… in the margins, of course.

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From the Book Cellar

In keeping with the theme of ahistorical textbooks, I have recently finished reading Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It by Janina Ramirez (2023, Hanover Square Press). This book aims to fill in the feminine pronoun holes in history and does a fairly good job of it.

Ramirez selects a few individuals, named and not, as subjects for each chapter and then uses actual evidence — and a bit of common sense — to paint in the context that produced each of these people. Moreover, though she does talk about some women who we might consider remarkable, unusual, unique, Ramirez clearly shows that these women were not aberrations in their time. It is our recent and rather slanted view of both women and the Medieval period, coming to us through the distorted lens of white male writers in the 19th and 20th centuries, that makes her subjects seem singular. Hildegard of Bingen was an amazing person. She was not an amazing woman. Nor was she an anomaly specifically of her times. She would be as amazing today as she was then. But the truly amazing thing is that she was not alone, neither of her sex nor of her times. She was one of many amazing people, well more than half of whom are completely invisible to modern eyes — because they have been intentionally erased.

Because Ramirez is using archeology and history to see the past, even she can’t see much of the more common lives, the small, not-especially-amazing folk who make up the majority of humanity but who don’t leave behind well-stocked graves or bound volumes of illuminated prose. Still, she takes pains to point out that the women she studies were not aberrations to the people of their times. These women were widely respected and loved, enough so that others buried their bodies in well-stocked graves and lovingly preserved the books they left behind. If our notions of incontestable male dominance were as common to Medieval peoples, then women like Hildegard or like the many women buried with all the regalia of leadership would, at best, have been seen as freaks. There would not be rich graves around a female body if respect for women and more egalitarian attitudes were not commonalities. Note that in our day, a wealthy woman in a position of power is considered a freak, and we don’t reverence people like her in our memories… So in describing these elite women, Ramirez is also showing us a glimpse of the wider world that they inhabited, the world that made them what they were, the world that preserved their memories for centuries.

Seeing these women and their times afresh has also revealed a bit more of our own culture and times. For example, there is a description of a Viking woman who was buried with all the regalia of a military leader — right down to the strategy game board placed in her lap. (She was buried upright, seated in a throne-like chair.) The story left behind in this burial, but tantalizingly just out of focus, was of a very different culture to that which we name Viking. This woman would not have called herself a Viking, for starters. But what struck me was that the pictures we carry around in our heads of Viking culture and people, though very different to the actual evidence that they left behind, are not very different to invasive colonialism and rapacious capitalism. These Viking stories are not about 1st millennial Nordic peoples; they’re about us.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that there is really not much difference between an elite textbook Viking and a titan of capitalism. Well, there are two differences, I suppose. It takes far more specialized skill, knowledge, bravery and body conditioning to be a Viking. It takes very little to be a capitalist except a remarkable lack of empathy, morality and repugnance for daily violence. The other difference is that Vikings raided the wealthy. They were notably redistributive, putting gold and valuable treasures back into wider circulation. They didn’t much bother with poor people. (Because why?) But capitalism is Viking raiding inverted, taking labor and material value from the poor and transferring it to an ever-dwindling number of wealthy elites. It only works because it is on a vastly wider scale than Viking raids — and it is currently breaking because even a global market can’t extract a surplus to funnel upwards anymore.

In any case, I found Femina highly illuminating, history as I would like it to be taught… so that maybe I wouldn’t work with high school honors students who haven’t the vaguest notion of their own story. Never mind Hildegard’s. Or the not-a-Viking woman buried near Birka. Or all the other invisible normalcy of the past.

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Solstice Time-keeping

Just as a point of curiosity, the earliest sunrises of the year ended this morning. There was enough shift in both day length and the meridian time that the time of sunrise is one minute of clock-time later today than yesterday. The latest sunsets begin in two days.

I guess I haven’t mentioned it much, but if you want to stand under the solstice sun at her zenith in the sky, that time is not likely to be exactly noon — unless you live in the tropics.

In my part of the world, the solstice sun is highest in the sky at 12:51pm. Those north of here have later midpoints. For example, today in Helsinki (a northern city I selected for the random reason that I know people there and it jumped out of the map) the middle of daylight is 1:21pm. If you’re obsessive about timing or just curious about the rhythms we don’t often notice, go look up your own town on the sun calendar at Time and Date.

Interestingly, in Central Vermont the sun reaches its latest zenith time, 12:55pm, on July 8th, well after the solstice has ended and day length has already been shortened by over twenty minutes.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2023