Balkanizing Grievance Holiday
During the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. It declared that enslaved people in Confederate states were free. Slavery was not officially abolished in the United States until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment on December 6, 1865. When Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, they proclaimed that freedom slavery.
The first official Juneteenth celebrations took place in Texas on June 19, 1866. Juneteenth was made a federal holiday in 2021.
From the article, We Have Another Balkanizing Grievance Holiday, Rather Than a Day To Celebrate Freedom, by Allan Stevo, Lew Rockwell, 20 June 2026:
... Somewhere along the way, the day of celebrating freedom - Juneteenth - turned into a black nationalist holiday. And not just black nationalist, but a certain flavor of black nationalism, with a disempowerment to it.
Somewhere along the way, the day which could be a celebration of American society over slavery, and a triumph of Western culture over slavery, a triumph of Christianity, even, over slavery - somehow all gave way to divisiveness...
A few minutes spent at the local Juneteenth events is easy enough to see it as a day of seething anger...
... I do not want the balkanization of this land. I want unity in this land. United we stand, divided we fall remains a worthy aspiration. Some level of unity and homogeneity of culture is needed...
No matter what it says on paper, in practice, Juneteenth is just another grievance holiday...
Grievance holidays leave room for division and disempowerment - which is exactly the opposite of what we should want as a people: both as Christians and as Americans...
It almost seems like our betters wish to see this become a weak, divided, easily conquerable land...
It should be noted that Marxism failed to divide America according to social class, because America is a land of opportunity where the middle class is prosperous. Thus it turned to dividing America according to race, and has been successful in doing so.