Regardless, people have been calling it Juneteenth for over a hundred years, it was made a national holiday as Juneteenth, I'm gonna keep calling it that.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

You may be surprised to learn that, coincidentally, America has more people in prison than anywhere else.

It may have encouraged some slaves in the Confederacy to flee, if they found out about it.

Kind of makes sense to me.

To expand on this, knowingbetter did an in-depth video on this topic[0]. The salient bit is that penal slavery was ended in 1941-1942 by Roosevelt, so that the Japanese couldn't use it as war propaganda against the US.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA

It's been called Juneteenth for more than a century, and has been a state holiday for almost half a century.

Wouldn't it be even more ridiculous if the US federal government took an existing celebration and renamed it?

That shouldn't be considered a naming failure. It's an education failure.

>I bet if you I were to walk down the street here and ask 10 people what Juneteenth is only 1 would be able to do better than: "something to do with freeing the slaves".

And lots of people think Cinco de Mayo is Mexico's Independence Day, doesn't make the holiday any less valid. It's just an issue of education.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzPBaC6VPuU

You must be some sort of communist! There's a Trucktober question on the naturalization test, right before the one about Thanksgiving.

So your anecdote isn't useful. Kind of the opposite.

I mean won't every nation have its own history and important days? And it seems to me that those days in every nation will be different. I'd even wager very few of us, (far less than 1%), know what those important days are called in other nations.

The 13th amendment specifically carves out an exception to allow prisoners to be enslaved. They aren't just using political rhetoric: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_exception_clause

You know in movies and cartoons and stuff when you'd see like, a whole bunch of prisoners in striped pajamas, chained together breaking rocks or digging ditches or whatever? Those are depictions of an enslaved workforce.

"Since 2018, about 575 companies and more than 100 public agencies in Alabama have used incarcerated people as landscapers, janitors, drivers, metal fabricators and fast-food workers, the lawsuit states, reaping an annual benefit of $450 million."

Also, if Serbia has some holidays that I can't recognize when I read them from a calendar, should Serbia change the names of them for me? Or is it only the words that black Americans use that aren't real when random people don't recognize them?

What you have just told me is a FEATURE. Not a BUG.

I'm very GOOD with people "not immediately knowing." I like that. It forces them to learn about my people and culture.

"Juneteenth" makes you step in and perhaps get a little uncomfortable, like, hmm weird little Black-sounding phrase?

"Emancipation Day" frees (lol) you from engaging, you can just sort of take on the same ol same ol story, which, I imagine for many people starts with Abraham Lincoln and not Black people.

shall we also rename shabbat and yom kippur and purim so that "outsiders" can have a clue?

people are so tone deaf sometimes - it's not for you - it's for the people whose ancestors were freed on this day.

> the word itself gives you nothing to help you understand

neither does any other word that you don't bother to look up in dictionary or encyclopedia.

Observances regularly don't give you a clue what they are about. Like, if you weren't already aware about Martin Luther King, Jr. day, you'd have to Google it to know what's up. Same with Rosh Hashana. Or Eid. I think you might be getting stuck on something that is demonstrably not a unique phenomena and it's reading a little like there's something about Juneteenth itself that's bothering you.

They mostly all have something to do with the ending of slavery but it is different things in different states. For example in Massachusetts it is on July 8th and commemorates slavery being found to be legally unenforceable there under in a 1783 decision.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_Day#United_States

.. which is hard because when you start making accounts of them you begin to realize how universal and yet unrecognized so many of our contributions are.

Trying to flatten the situation into one general group vs another cannot explain the complexity of the situation, like the fact that there were black and mixed-race slave owners, or that Delaware fought for the Union Army despite being a slave state.