In fairness, a lot of people don't know what "Juneteenth" is. I did my undergrad studies in downtown Atlanta, which was the first time I'd heard of it. It wasn't a celebrated holiday in the mountains, but it was a big deal in the city.
Also, the conflation of the holiday celebrating liberation from slavery and the completely separate (and much later) Tulsa massacre isn't exactly his fault either. His surrogates are complaining that it's racist of Trump to give a talk in Tulsa on 19 June. Somebody probably tried to explain that to him, and he just didn't follow the details of the explanation.
Trump probably doesn't know why 19 June is significant either; and may well not have heard of the Tulsa massacre either. These men are 70+ years old, and their educations won't have focused on such things the way contemporary education does. Americans were still being taught that their country was a beacon of hope with noble principles in those days.
It's just strange to see an old man like Biden trying to play in the grievance culture war he plainly doesn't understand. He knows he's supposed to accuse his opponent of racism; that's been part of the playbook for decades. It's just the need to know all these intersectional details that's confusing him.
June 19th 2020 being a Friday, and the 17th being a Wednesday, would hardly enter into the considerations. Maybe he'll mention all those Union soldiers saluting the CSA as they lay down arms at Appomattox because they were all back to being Americans, there would be no treason trials or hereditary guilt, unlike in Ireland or lots of other palces on the planet.
ReplyDelete"Americans were still being taught that their country was a beacon of hope with noble principles in those days."
ReplyDeleteI guess Biden must have slept through those classes.
I maybe conflating this with later exposure but I recall 'Juneteenth' having a burst of popularity around the time Ken Burn's Civil War history documentary was running on PBS. I also have some dim memory of race riots in the post-WWI period being discussed, possibly in relation to Condoleezza Rice, or possibly in a work of fiction. Not exactly unknown but certainly nothing I learned in school. I think my history education was pretty typical, and kinda went straight from the Civil War to the Depression and WWII, with very little time spent on later 19th Century, and then skipping ahead again to the 1960s.
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1271644265014276097?s=20
ReplyDeleteTrump changed it to 20th.