Weekly Roundup: The SCOTUS Surprise and the POTUS Demise
Brad and Dan discuss the expanded recognition of Juneteenth and its significance for American history, the surprising new from SCOTUS on discrimination against LGBTQ people in the workplace and DACA, Louie Giglio's "White blessings," and the growing perception that white people are discriminated against as much as Black people and other minorities. Bonus: explainer on the distinction between taking down Confederate monuments and other historical memorials.
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AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor, Religious Studies, Skidmore College, and I'm here with my co-host, I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Good to see you, Dan.
These weeks feel like years.
I keep saying that, but it is true.
They're also just saturated.
There is just no way.
We could do a seven-hour show today if we wanted to try to get everything included, but there's just no way for us to cover everything.
It really feels like we're trying to drink out of a fire hose here.
So we're gonna highlight a bunch of things, but we need to start with the fact that today is Juneteenth, and I suspect that For many of you, you know, sort of learning about Juneteenth may be a new thing and maybe you've just learned about in the last month, the last year, the last couple years.
We went over what Juneteenth is.
Last week and we explained how Juneteenth marks what is sort of understood to be Emancipation Day and the emancipation of slaves reaching some of the last people and the last enslaved people in Texas.
You know, I have a friend from Texas, Dan, who I was speaking to yesterday and he said, you know, Juneteenth's one of the few sort of Aspects of non-white history that is taught in Texas public school curriculum.
But there's also this sense that it is a way to say, okay, Juneteenth, that was great.
Now this is over, so we no longer have to deal with it.
Yay, everyone, we did it.
Pat on the back.
I just wanted to open today, Dan, with a quote.
There's a great piece at the Atlantic today by Kelly Carter Jackson.
She really goes through how the celebration of Juneteenth has taken place in the country, historically.
She chronicles black-led celebrations, but she also chronicles this paradox that I think my friend was pointing to, and here's what she says.
Despite the numerous ways to honor Juneteenth, one thing about the holiday endures throughout generations—the paradox of Black people's lived experiences.
How could they at once celebrate freedom and still acknowledge that the residue of slavery continues to influence their lives?
The turn of the century represented the height of Black minstrelsy, violent attacks on Black communities, and the Supreme Court ruling on Plessy v. Ferguson, which made segregation the law of the land.
She goes on to just talk about how Juneteenth is paradoxical and I think that that is just really Really captures some of the the sentiment of what's happening in our country today We are seeing a national uprising.
We're seeing a national movement for black lives.
We are seeing a coalition building that is in many ways causing rapid reform across the country And yet the celebration of Juneteenth, the celebration of freedom for African Americans, is even today, and still today, pervaded by the sense of violence, of marginalization, and inequality.
And so, as we observe Juneteenth, as we celebrate this history, as we celebrate with the Black community, and alongside the Black community, the emancipation That was proclaimed to the enslaved peoples in Texas in 1865.
We also recognize that this this proclamation of freedom remains paradoxical.
So Dan, thoughts on this before we jump into some other things?
Just to echo everything that you said, we talked last week about Donald Trump having his kind of, you know, kickoff or reboot of his 2020 re-election campaign was scheduled for Tulsa tonight.
It was going to be tonight, the 19th.
um they rescheduled that uh if everybody remembers we talked about this and originally he tried to pitch it as somehow being done in honor of Juneteenth and then later he said that it was you know out of respect for Juneteenth that they're rescheduling it And there was an acknowledgement that he didn't know about Juneteenth.
I'm positive he didn't.
I'm also, this is speculative on my part, but I'd put money on it that his advisors did and that's why they chose Tulsa.
We talked about the Black Wall Street massacres, it's known, or the 1921 massacre in Tulsa and on Juneteenth and all of that.
But Trump still managed to make it about him this week and tweeted out that like, you know, because of him lots of people are learning about Juneteenth and he made it better known.
He did what is something that he often does where he says, you know, something about, you know, before he talked about it, nobody knew what that was.
Nobody had even heard of it.
For people who don't know or haven't pieced this together yet, that's Trump speak for he didn't know about it.
He does this with all kinds of stuff.
If he didn't know that the sun rose in the east and you told him, he would start tweeting about it.
Very few people know that the sun rises in the east.
He did this with the Civil War a few years ago when he said, you know, nobody asked, nobody wonders why there had to be a civil war.
That's a question that nobody really thinks about.
It's one of the most studied things in U.S.
history.
So anyway, just the way that it continues, as you say, it continues to be both a kind of celebration and an aspiration and I think a call for action of what hasn't been achieved.
And all of that is still wrapped up in what we've been talking about under the rubric of Christian nationalism and Trump is this this kind of white Christian nationalist who still wants to make it about white people.
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