Naming Juneteenth

One neighbor’s hesitation raised a larger question: what happens when historical honesty collides with identity?

Photo by Vitalii Abakumov on Unsplash

“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

— Maya Angelou

I made small talk with my neighbor in the elevator today. She had lengthened her eyelashes, giving her almond eyes a soft, wispy framing. Her one-year-old was wearing new sandals, adorned with decorative cherries on the top straps.

I had held the elevator for them because the little one was tripping quite a bit in the new sandals. The older son was wearing a flashy shirt. Everyone’s hair had been done recently. By their dress, they were clearly going somewhere special, which can be a rarity for a single mother with four children, three of whom are currently under the age of five.

“You look lovely,” I commented, “Where are you headed?”

“Some festival,” she mumbled.

My neighbor is a Black woman, and the only festival in town was a Juneteenth Celebration. Her vague description of the event struck me as odd.

“The Juneteenth Celebration?” I clarified.

“Maybe that’s what it is,” she replied.

I was puzzled. Why wouldn’t she name it? Did she truly not know the purpose of the festival she was attending with her children?

“I was surprised,” I continued, “that they decided to hold the Juneteenth Celebration the day after Juneteenth.”

“Yeah, I know!” she exclaimed, “I was surprised, too!”

There it was. She wasn’t dressing herself and her children in their best for a random festival. She had just hesitated to speak it to me, a white, middle-aged woman, in an elevator.

I don’t know why she called it “some festival.” Maybe she was distracted by a toddler tripping in new sandals. Maybe she didn’t know me well enough to assume the conversation was safe. Maybe years of experience taught her to test the waters before naming a holiday that routinely attracts hostility online and off. Maybe several of those things were true at once. Whatever the reason, the exchange stayed with me.

I have spoken proudly about honoring Juneteenth. I have never received pushback. The social conditions that taught her “some festival” might be safer than “Juneteenth” with a white neighbor weren’t created by me and can’t be solved by me being a good person in an elevator. They predate me. I just happened to be standing in them that day, and so did she.

What social conditions make naming a federal holiday feel risky for some people and not others? To answer that question, we must look at the history of the holiday itself.

Juneteenth became a federal holiday on June 17, 2021, when President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law, officially recognizing June 19th as the day in 1865 when Union troops in Galveston, Texas, enforced the Emancipation Proclamation for the last enslaved people in the country. Even before federal recognition, Juneteenth had been celebrated for over a century, beginning in Texas in 1866, and first recognized as a state holiday there in 1980.

Our country was founded on the ideals of freedom, liberty, and justice. Juneteenth is, at its core, a story about liberty. And yet social media fills with complaints, comment sections grow hostile and politicians issue competing statements. A holiday commemorating the end of slavery is somehow interpreted as controversial.

If freedom is one of America’s highest ideals, why would recognizing more freedom for more people be divisive — creating the very social conditions we experienced in that elevator? The answer may have less to do with Juneteenth itself than with the stories Americans tell about their country, and more individually, about identity.

For many Americans, history is not simply a collection of dates and facts. It is part of identity. It shapes how people understand who they are, where they came from, and what their nation represents. When history confirms our preferred narratives, we rarely notice. But when it challenges them, we pay attention.

For some Americans, Juneteenth represents a triumph. It is proof that the nation eventually expanded the promise of liberty to people who had long been denied it. For others, the holiday feels uncomfortable because it forces a confrontation with contradiction: the United States declared that all men are created equal while millions remained enslaved. Both statements are true.

The tension emerges when people mistake historical honesty for condemnation. Celebrating the end of slavery is not an attack on America or on individual identities. Teaching history does not require abandoning patriotism. In fact, a mature democracy depends on the ability to examine its failures as well as its achievements. A nation confident in its values can face its difficult chapters directly without erasing them.

When a piece of history threatens the story people tell about themselves, the reaction is often predictable. The facts are minimized. The conversation is redirected. Anger arrives before curiosity. What is being defended is not history itself, but identity.

I benefited from those social conditions in a specific way. When I first named it, she relaxed. I had the power to make the world safe in that space. She didn’t. She had to wait and see if the white person would use that power, in one elevator, on one Saturday morning.

The holiday’s controversy isn’t abstract. It lives in that elevator. It lives in the learned habit of saying “some festival” until proven otherwise. Today, a Black woman taking her kids to a Juneteenth celebration has to run a quick calculation about whether her white neighbor can handle the name of a federal holiday. She had to determine which kind of white person I am — someone who defends a narrative that props up her identity, or someone who can hold the tension of a country that has never fully lived up to its own ideals.

Perhaps Juneteenth asks us to sit with exactly that tension. So long as we avoid it, my Black neighbors will have to keep running rapid reads of the elevator, of me, of what naming a thing might cost — a pattern recognition built not from paranoia, but from experience.

I went home thinking about that brief interaction. She went to the Juneteenth Celebration with her children. Not some festival. Not a euphemism. Not a holiday that needs to be whispered around strangers. Juneteenth. A celebration of freedom. A federal holiday. A piece of American history. And if saying its name still requires calculation in some elevators, then perhaps that tells us something about the work that remains.

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”

— Plato

Megan M. American Horse is a Minnesota-based columnist and advocate whose writing explores democracy, history, civil liberties, and family life. She is particularly interested in the intersection of policy, identity, and the everyday experiences that reveal larger social truths.