For all of the boasting the GOP has done lately about making marginal progress in attracting Black voters, Republicans continue to have no issue whatsoever with playing around in Black people’s faces about our history and about America’s legacy of racism, anti-Black cruelty and exploitation, which they continue to downplay while celebrating the very institution that fought a war to keep us in bondage and intergenerational servitude.
Take, for example, an Alabama House bill that would give state employees the option of either getting a paid day off for Juneteenth or for Jefferson Davis’ Birthday, which is already a paid state holiday that also takes place in June.
From Al.com:
HB 367, sponsored by Chris Sells, R-Greenville, would add the June 19 holiday, which celebrates the end of slavery, to the current list of 13 days Alabama officially celebrates and offers the day off for state employees.
But Juneteenth would not be an additional day off. Instead, state employees would be able to take that day off or Jefferson Davis’ Birthday, a state holiday marked on the first Monday in June.
For those who aren’t Civil War history buffs and are unfamiliar with Davis, he was the president of the Confederate States—you know—that huge chunk of America that split off from the Union for roughly four years during the mid-late 1800s because white southerners were basically like: WTF you mean we can’t run our economy the way we see fit just because it’s entirely dependant on using negros as human cotton field clearing machines? DOWN WITH GOVERNMENT OPPRESSION!!!
In fact, Davis himself famously declared that Black people are “fitted expressly for servitude.” So, the question is: Why would Sells and other Republicans want to literally and specifically pit these two holidays against each other by letting citizens decide which they’re going to celebrate? (Spoiler alert: Sells’ lame-ass excuse will not help her case much.)
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