“What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” said abolitionist, ex-slave with a white slaver as a father, Fredrick Douglas. The fourth of July story of the United States declaring independence from its parent Great Britain was built on a lie.

Their favored story that they meant “all men are created equal” a lie that the American (businessmen) revolutionaries told those who they enslaved to fight for them instead of siding with the British Loyalists with promises of freedom on both sides. After winning the war the United States kept the slaves for themselves, codifying and preserving the institution until the next war a century later. This question in mind, I ask what to the White American is the Juneteenth?

What does a commemoration of a black Texas holiday precipitated on the last of the last slaves in Galveston, TX hearing of the end of their chattel slavery mean to the grandchildren of the enslavers? Or the immigrants the whites in charge let in on the ill gotten gains from slavery? Mind you, the wealth they (whites) continue to withhold from the descendants of the slaves freed this day?

To the Biden administration Juneteenth was a symbolic gesture to the low information black voter base that by their estimation that costs nothing. It replaces Columbus Day as a paid holiday on the federal holiday calendar. Perhaps to the typical White American, the Juneteenth federal holiday is a more conveniently located paid holiday to fire up the grill for during the summer rather than early autumn Labor Day.

One thing is clear, Juneteenth as a federal holiday is not closing the black-white wealth gap or income gap, or health gap, or police violence or consciousness of all either. Or, perhaps most of all it is not improving mainstream white consciousness on the precarious position most urban blacks that they may see about their day are facing widespread displacement from gentrification and persistent racism in the private job sector.

So, to the white American, what does Juneteenth mean?