Of What to the Slave is Juneteenth?

Racial slavery remains an under-theorized and misunderstood condition.

We live in the afterlife of slavery. Two hundred years ago, when the slaves in Haiti rose up, they, of necessity, burned everything:

A French officer asks a slave prisoner: “Why do you burn everything?” “We have a right to burn what we cultivate because a man has a right to dispose of his own labour,” was the reply of this unknown anarchist. The slaves burned everything because everything was against them. Everything was against the slaves, the entire order that it was their lot to follow, the entire order in which they were positioned as worse than senseless things, every plantation, everything. Toussaint L’Overture, leader of the Haitian revolution said “God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time.” The slaves burned everything, yes, but, unfortunately, they only burned everything in Haiti. There’s was the greatest and most successful revolution in the history of the world, and the failure of their fire to cross the waters was the greatest tragedy in history. — “Perfecting Slavery” by Anthony Paul Farley

Indeed, the slave power that is the United States now threatens an entire world with the death that it has become - and so the slaves of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, those with nothing but their chains to lose, must, if they would be free, if they would escape slavery, win the entire world.

A paradox of black life: we exist in a state of perpetual tragedy and yet we are never allowed to mourn. We have restricted grief, but no space for mourning. Because mourning would give us too much power. I know we want something to celebrate, but black celebration has never been the sterile performance that whiteness presents back to us.

There is no “up from slavery,” there is no progress. Our struggles for integration are what make the law. We are made to believe that our blood, our pain, our broken bodies somehow perfect democracy. That we are martyrs, sacrificial lambs for an imperfect but striving country. But the truth is Black Death is what makes this country’s democracy possible. That the desire for integration is the perfection of slavery. A federal holiday for Juneteenth is the perfection of slavery. What can we imagine? What could Juneteenth be if we keep ownership of it? What if all black people went on strike? What if our co-conspirators performed collective acts of sabotage and whistleblowing? What if we burned down a building, one for every extra day that the slaves in Texas were denied knowledge of their freedom? I want to celebrate August 21, 1831, Nat Turner’s rebellion. I want to honor August 21 1971, the assassination of George Jackson during the Attica Rebellion. Freedom is the call and abolition is the only answer. What is burned will grow again, but the best fertilizer is plantation owner’s foot.