Category Archives: history

Isolated Thoughts: Donald Trump’s Inadvertent Juneteenth Truth

Hello again. It’s been some time since last I posted. Then again, this is by no means the longest hiatus this blog has had. I’ve been noodling around with a post about the wall I hit in early May, and the anxiety and depression the lockdown induced for the remainder of the month. I may or may not post that … in the present moment, however, it seems more than a little self-centered.

Since the murder of George Floyd and the massive protests that have swept not just the U.S. but the world, I’ve been trying to work through my thoughts as a white man of enormous privilege, and my relationship to these events, and how best I can respond and be an ally. The best response I think sympathetic white people can have is simple: listen; read; listen more; put your resources where they’re best used, like donating to organizations that help Black causes; keep listening; shut up; and when you’re not shutting up, talk amongst ourselves to foment anti-racist attitudes and actions. The onus at this point in time should not be on making Black, Indigenous, and people of colour do the emotional work of explaining to us yet again the realities of systemic racism and white supremacy.

To that end, I’ve been working on a handful of posts addressing issues arising from the turmoil of the protests, and I’m aiming them at my white friends. Not exclusively, mind you—I’m just writing with a white audience in mind, and if anyone wants to step in and tell me where I’m fucking up? Please. By all means.

Anyway, I do have a tendency to ramble, so here’s the TL;DR: we’re learning about the elisions of Black history of late, and we, as white people, would do well to grasp that if we actually want to help in the process of dismantling white supremacy.


Though Donald Trump’s ignorance is boundless, and there are countless ways in which he demonstrates it, I think my favourite is when he cites a widely-known fact and then proceeds to make it painfully obvious that he had just learned it moments before. Case in point: that time he mentioned that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, following up that observation by saying “Not many people know that, but it’s true.” Which made me wonder at the time how he’d managed to go through life, and indeed the nominating process for the Republican Party, never having heard it referred to as “the party of Lincoln.” (I like to imagine his shock at hearing that the president who freed the slaves and defeated the Confederacy wasn’t just a Republican, but was indeed one of the founders of the party; in Trump’s mayfly-like brain I have to think he just assumed anyone who was anti-slavery and anti-confederacy was a politically correct SJW and therefore a Democrat).

There are numerous other such instances, many of which were the inevitable by-product of his daily COVID-19 press briefings, where he demonstrated his ignorance not just of basic medicine but common sense, such as when he asked why they just weren’t using flu vaccines to combat coronavirus, or of course whether drinking disinfectant or getting a UV enema would be an effective treatment.

Most recently (as of this writing, that is—in the time it takes me to rattle out this post, he’s almost certainly exhibited his ignorance in dozens of ways), he took credit for making Juneteenth “famous.” In an interview, he said, “I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous. It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it.”

I cannot begin to enumerate the ways in which having Donald J. Trump take credit for one of the most important dates in the Black American calendar is infuriating—and I say that as a white guy. I cannot begin to imagine how such an enormity lands in the Black community, though I suspect that there are possibly more long-suffering sighs than shouts of rage. I could be wrong, of course, but ignorance of Black history among white Americans (and white people generally) is a long-standing issue keenly felt by African Americans; and if there is an uncomfortable truth buried in Trump’s self-aggrandizement, it’s this: he’s not exactly wrong. He has made Juneteenth famous, albeit inadvertently, and through an act of offensive scheduling I suspect was deliberate. Not by Trump, of course, who, it turns out, had to be told why people were outraged he’d scheduled a rally on June 19th by a Black Secret Service agent in his detail.

By now, many of those who had been previously unaware of the significance of the date have been schooled, but I’ll leave it to Amber Ruffin to deliver a succinct explanation:

I’ve known the significance of Juneteenth for a long time, but the way in which I learned it was mortifying enough to deserve a retelling. I can even point to the year in which I was enlightened on this point: 1999, the year in which Ralph Ellison’s second novel, Juneteenth, was published posthumously to a certain amount of controversy. Ellison was the author of the 1952 novel Invisible Man, a landmark work of African-American literature, and, in my professional opinion (and not an outlier opinion, by any means), one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. It remained the only novel Ellison wrote in his lifetime (he died in 1994). When Juneteenth was published, there was controversy over whether or not Ellison had wanted that—which of course, excited a lot of debate among academic types. I was in the second year of my PhD, and first heard about Juneteenth from an American Lit prof at Western. We discussed the ethics of such posthumous publication over pints at the Grad Club, and I said in passing, “Weird title, though.” At which the professor cocked his head, and proceeded to gently explain the significance of the word.

As I say, it was mortifying. But not quite as mortifying as the fact that it was only many years later, as an actual tenured professor of American literature, that I learned about the Tulsa race massacre of 1921.

The galling offense of Trump’s planned June 19th rally is compounded by the fact that it will be held in Tulsa, Oklahoma—not today, as originally planned, but tomorrow, out of “respect” for Juneteenth—the site of the single worst episode of anti-Black racial violence in American history. Tulsa had a lively and prosperous Black community. Part of the Greenwood district of Tulsa was known colloquially as “Black Wall Street,” as it boasted a significant number of prosperous Black-owned businesses And over the course of two days in 1921,  whites, led by members of the KKK, descended on Greenwood with guns, clubs, and bombs, beating and shooting people, and burning Black homes and businesses. They even employed airplanes to strafe and bomb the residents and buildings from the sky. The putative reason for the violence was the same as that for so many lynchings in American history: a young Black man was accused of assaulting a white woman, and was taken into custody. When some members of the Black community converged on the courthouse in order to prevent the young man from meeting such a fate, they were met by a white mob. Shots were fired, and the city descended into an orgy of violence against Greenwood, Black Wall Street, and its inhabitants.

For a more thorough recounting of the brutal and tragic events of those two days, read Brent Staples’ piece in the New York Times.

The Tulsa Massacre, as so many such events have, fell down the memory hole of history. Indeed, it was actively erased: it wasn’t until the 1990s that a thorough accounting of the massacre was made, and even then it has largely remained a lacuna in mainstream retellings of American history. So when Donald Trump takes credit for making Juneteenth famous, he may as well also claim to have reminded white Americans about a forgotten episode of American history. The specific scheduling of this rally in Tulsa, I am certain, was lost on Trump, but I cannot believe it was accidental: Trump is an historical ignoramus, but there are those on his staff (I’m looking at you, Stephen Miller) with knowledge enough and malevolence aplenty to have been deliberate in this insult. As Adam Serwer said in what I think is the most insightful evaluation of the Trump Administration’s motivations, “The Cruelty is the Point.”

It is a point of profound embarrassment to me that it was only relatively recently that I learned of the Tulsa Massacre. I might well be admitting professional malpractice: as someone who frequently teaches African-American literature, I invariably deliver several lectures evert year in which I offer historical context about the realities of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the history of lynching, and the myriad other brutalities and indignities visited on Black America so that my students might have an inkling of context when they read Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Audre Lorde, Colson Whitehead, James Baldwin, or any of the other brilliant Black authors whom I have had the privilege of teaching. And yet it was only about two or three years ago when I read the novel Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff (ironically, a white author) that I first really learned about Tulsa. More recently, the HBO series Watchmen—based upon Alan Moore’s landmark 1985 graphic novel—made the Tulsa Massacre a core event of its reworking of the source material, indeed making it the first scene of the series (be warned: this is actually somewhat difficult to watch):

My ultimate point here is that Trump has accidentally given us a gift: whatever malevolent intent lurks behind the scheduling of his rally on Juneteenth in Tulsa, we should refocus the energy of the outrage that evokes into introspection: realizing that these historical elisions are emblematic of the much larger issue of race in America, and quite possibly using that as a retort whenever someone bleats about the removal of Confederate monuments as “erasing history”—to point out that all such monuments were already erasures of history, given that they were erected with the express purpose of (literally) whitewashing the twin legacies of slavery and the Civil War.

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Revolutionary Thoughts

76 vs. 89

I had an odd thought yesterday morning, apropos of what I’m about to write about in this post, but I thought it was funny enough in the weird connection it makes to lead off with it.

The musicals Hamilton and Rent don’t have very much in common besides being huge Broadway hits and featuring generally attractive, youthful casts. But they do both focus on ensembles of people who fancy themselves revolutionaries: in the first case, the ardent young men who become the United States’ founding fathers; in the second, a ragtag group of bohemian would-be artists who rebel against the suffocating strictures of mainstream culture. The title song of Rent signals their first act of resistance upon receiving an eviction notice. The song agonizes over how they’re “gonna pay last year’s rent,” but by the end resolves:

When they act tough—you call their bluff
We’re not gonna pay
We’re not gonna pay
We’re not gonna pay
Last year’s rent
This year’s rent
Next year’s rent
Rent rent rent rent rent
We’re not gonna pay rent

Whenever I think of Rent or hear its music, it always puts me in mind of the late great David Rakoff’s eviscerating critique of the musical (which you can listen to here), in which he points out that none of the play’s would-be artists seem ever to want to do the work of being artists. But his key bone of contention is: “Well … why won’t you pay your rent?” At the very end of his essay, he recounts, of his agonistic 20s:

There were days when it hardly seemed worth it to live in a horrible part of town just so that I could go daily to a stupid, soul-crushing, low-paying job, especially since, as deeply as I yearned to be creative, for years and years I was too scared to even try. So I did nothing. But here’s something that I did do. I paid my fucking rent.

It occurs to me, perhaps uncharitably, that the Revolutionary War part of Hamilton is basically the founding fathers chanting “We’re not gonna pay rent!—albeit with better songs and a somewhat more nuanced rationale for why they’re not gonna pay rent than their bohemian counterparts.


I had this weird thought after reading a column by Bret Stephens, one of the New York Times representative conservatives, titled “Robespierre’s America.” Happily, the TL;DR is in the subtitle: “We need to reclaim the spirit of 1776, not the certitudes of 1789.”

If you’re at all familiar with Stephens’ columns, you probably know what’s coming: an invective against the woke sanctimony of the politically correct left, compared unfavourably with the reason and rationality of the Enlightenment principles on which the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were based. He enumerates a series of excesses—starting with his own victimization at the hands of a Twitter mob for calling Reza Aslan stupid—mostly recounted in the abstract, referring to professors afraid to offend students and publishers dropping books at the first whiff of controversy, comparing the ideological rigidity of the woke left to that of the Jacobins:


Leaving aside the egregious comparison of Twitter warriors with people who literally decapitated thousands, let’s address the implicit comparison Stephens makes between the American Revolution and the French—implicit, because he never explains what he means by the “spirit of 1776.” One assumes he’s citing the tacit understanding of America’s founding as rooted in and emerging from Enlightenment principles of reason, rationality, and spirited public debate—the very understanding, indeed, that made it possible for Lin-Manuel Miranda to write compelling rap battles about the creation of a national bank and the wisdom of carrying a national debt. Certainly, that’s the implied contrast with the ideological fanaticism of Robespierre and his murderous Jacobin thugs.

Normally, this sort of thing wouldn’t bother me overmuch—I find Bret Stephens’ columns annoying, but predictable and forgettable—but given that yesterday was the Fourth of July, I found myself in a headspace to think about 1776 and the American Revolution, so to me the most glaring aspect of “Robespierre’s America” is the way it so perfectly recapitulates—albeit implicitly—certain fallacies not just about the American Revolution, but revolutions generally.

I tend to be leery of revolutions, given that history teaches us that, the more extreme they are, the more they tend to turn into versions of their own worst selves. Hence, the French Revolution devolves into the Terror; the Russian Revolution turns into Stalinism. The fact that the American Revolution did not transform into something equally pernicious has been cited as evidence of American Exceptionalism, which is at least partially true; but I would argue that the principal reason the American Revolution had a relatively placid aftermath (yes, a lot of Loyalists were persecuted, often egregiously, but that hardly compares to 1790s Paris) is that nothing really changed. The radicalism of 1776 wasn’t that of material effect, but of promise—not what actually changed on the ground, but what could possibly change in the future.

For all intents and purposes, there were no upheavals in American life after the Declaration of Independence (well, aside from the war itself), by which I mean that the people in charge stayed in charge, and the power structures of the new United States were not appreciably different from the power structures of the Colonies. The King was not beheaded; the King was not even dethroned. George III basically had his status as absentee landlord revoked.

Hence my thought about Hamilton and Rent: the Boston Tea Party was basically a defiant gesture saying “We’re not gonna pay rent! Rent rent rent rent rent!”, as was the conflict that followed, and that defiant gesture is celebrated today as it was then. But after turfing the Brits, you bloody well better believe you’re paying your rent to the new owners.

By contrast, the French Revolution was about the radical overthrow of extant power, power so rooted in history, religion, and tradition that it went by the name of the ancien regime. And because of the weight of that history, it took decades to stabilize, something exacerbated by the fact that the rest of Europe was undergoing similar political upheavals. Is it any wonder that, mere years after guillotining the king, France had an Emperor?

(All of this is very broad strokes and probably has my historian friends pulling their hair out.)

As I said above, the true radicalism of 1776 wasn’t about the founding fathers’ present moment, but about the future—about what the principles of the Constitution and Bill of Rights could and can do when they become uncomfortably unavoidable. I’d argue that the true American Revolution—which is to say, the truly revolutionary moment in American history—wasn’t 1776 and the aftermath, but the Civil War. The confederates might have been the rebels, but Lincoln was the revolutionary, insofar as that the abolition of slavery overturned a foundational basis of American society. No such upending occurred in 1776, and the principle of revolutions turning into their worst selves has been painfully present in the U.S. since Andrew Johnson reversed all of the provisions made for newly freed slaves during Reconstruction, and white people in the South embarked on a sustained campaign of terror against them.

(To say nothing of everything that has happened since then, which I can’t do justice to here. If you haven’t already, read Ta-Nehisi Coates landmark essay “The Case for Reparations”).

Stephens’ opposition of “the spirit of 1776” to “the certitudes of 1789” completely glosses the material circumstances of both. The Revolutionary era of America comprises one of the most astounding argumentative ferments of history, with the debates over democracy, individual rights, proper governance, the best ways to defy and prevent tyranny, and myriad other considerations, taking place in taverns, drawing-rooms, the streets, and, most importantly, in print, with pamphlets and newspapers flying back and forth in paper fusillades. It was a period that evinced precisely the kind of civic engagement to which we should aspire, but always with one crucial caveat in mind: it was the provenance of what we today call privilege, and it has largely remained so ever since. The irony of Stephens’ longing for the “spirit of 1776” as inspired by having been savaged on Twitter, is that had the spirit of that era been as inclusive in practice as it was in principle, we might not be experiencing quite the same polarization today. Stephens’ Twitter Jacobins aren’t analogous to Robespierre, but to the citizens who stormed the Bastille: people finding a voice, voice which had previously been denied to them, through newly available means.

Speaking of revolutions that turn into their worst selves: the tech and digital revolution, specifically the rise of the internet, was heralded by many in the early-mid 1990s as a utopian shift in human connection and collective knowledge; quarter of a century later, we can see clearly how, even where some aspects of that dream have been realized, the benefits are ambivalent at best. But one key element of digital culture is that it has eroded the prominence of traditional gatekeepers of public discourse in print and visual media, allowing for a host of other platforms online or in social media. These platforms give voice to people who long went unheard, and it should not come as a huge shock that a lot of these voices are angry. It is difficult to try and make the case for “the spirit of 1776” to groups of people for whom, historically, that place within spirited public debate was never an option.

I have to believe, however, that that particular spirit isn’t dead, and if the Bret Stephens of the world would pay closer attention to the nuanced and thoughtful arguments unfolding both in “legacy” media and the new, insurgent spaces (and less attention to Twitter), they might be less convinced that there’s a tumbrel waiting for them. Of course, that’s likely a futile suggestion: more likely, it is precisely the growing presence of previously marginalized voices that threatens them and gives rise to the spectre of a guillotine with their name on it.

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