Gerson Uaripi Tjihenuna
A week or so ago, Americans commemorated Juneteenth – the day slavery was abolished in Texas on 19 June 1865.
The term ‘Juneteenth’ references the date of the holiday, combining the words ‘June’ and ‘nineteenth’.
On that day, nearly a month and a half after the end of the Civil War, slavery was abolished statewide, signalling the end of a centuries-old institution of dehumanisation and abuse.
Celebrated today as Juneteenth or Emancipation Day, the holiday is an occasion to reflect upon a somber chapter of American history and to commemorate the liberation of enslaved people – those people happen to be African-Americans.
This year’s commemoration took place against the backdrop of another important milestone in the annals of American history, i.e. the ongoing hearings being conducted by the United States House of Representatives’ Select Committee on the 6th January Attack.
The committee was set up to investigate the attack on the US Capitol Hill (the seat of the US Congress) on January 2021, which was the culmination of Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election outcome.
At the time of the attack, the US Congress was finalising certifying Biden’s victory as the 46th president of the United States.
By the time the riot was over, fourteen people were injured, and multiple people had died.
Vandalism, destruction of property, theft and many other acts of violence were performed in the Capitol by the rioters.
What did the 6 January 2021 events have to do with Juneteenth or Emancipation Day?
We need to note that the American Civil War between the Northern and Southern states from 1861 – 1865 was about the abolition of slavery.
Eleven southern states, also known as the Confederate States, had left the Union in 1860 and 1861, mainly over the issue of the abolition of slavery.
The southern states were in favour of slavery, while the northern states were against it.
As the Trump supporters were marching on Capitol on 6 January 2021, a good number of them were seen on TV screens, waving the Confederate flag – their mission was not only to have the outcome of the presidential elections nullified, but they were also anti-minority and anti-Democratic Party supporters – and that is an open secret.
When Trump ascended to the Presidency in 2016, he basically reversed the American political life ninety degrees back to the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) days – both domestically and at the international level.
The phrase WASP has historically been used in reference to ‘an informal, but closed social group of high-status and influential white Americans of English Protestant ancestry’.
This is the group that is said to have controlled the political and social life of the US for many years.
It is worth noting that out of the 46 Presidents that have ruled America over the years, only John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama and now Joe Biden were not from this group.
Kennedy was a Roman Catholic, Obama is an African-American and Biden is Roman Catholic.
In an article that was published in The New York Times on 2 November 2016 and re-published in The Namibian newspaper of 4 November 2016, titled ‘Behind 2016’s Turmoil, A Crisis of White Identity’, Amanda Taub argues that: “…whiteness is more than just skin colour. You could define it as a membership in the ethno-national majority. What it really means is the privilege of not being defined as other”.
Therefore, in the minds of Donald Trump and his supporters, the protection of the American “nation” against international terrorism, immigration and other perceived “social evils” simply means the protection of the white ethnic majority.
During the campaign, leading to the 8th November 2016 Presidential elections, Donald Trump “went to town” in bashing women, African-Americans, Muslims, Jews, Latinos and specifically Mexicans.
His tone and vocabulary appealed to supra-racist groups like the Ku-Klux-Klan and other right-wing white elements.
This tone was repeated during his 2020 campaign.
I submit that racially-motivated killings have increased since the 2016 Trump presidency.
About two hundred African-Americans died at the hands of the police in 2021 alone – and as recently as 17th May 2022 – a white racist gunman randomly shot and killed ten African-Americans in a Buffalo supermarket; he left a racist manifesto in the supermarket.
To paraphrase Taub in the article referred to earlier on, the supra-racist elements in the US feel that “they are in a long line, leading uphill where they are hoping to get hold of the American dream, but alas the line has slowed down or even stopped because immigrants, African-Americans and other “outsiders” seem to be cutting the line”.
That was the heart of Trump’s campaign, which was heavily loaded with racism.
Taub further argues that: “…for decades, the language of white identity has only existed in the context of white supremacy. When that became taboo, it left white identity politics without a vocabulary”.
It was that white identity vocabulary vacuum that Trump saw and exploited to the full.
The 6 January 2021 attack on Capitol should be seen against this backdrop of a perceived “loss of political power” on the part of white supremacists.