Why we say "Happy" Juneteenth?

Video Transcript

“They knew we were free in 1863.
But they didn’t tell us ‘til 1865.”

That’s what Juneteenth is.
Not the day we were freed—
The day they finally stopped lying.
The day the last plantation ran out of excuses.
The day silence cracked under its own weight.

So when we say Happy Juneteenth—
we’re not celebrating America.
We’re celebrating the interruption.

“We say happy not because it was fair—
but because we’re still here.
Unburied. Unbroken. Unbought.”

You want quiet reflection?
Read the Emancipation Proclamation.
You want truth?

“Juneteenth is the funeral of their secret.
And the birth of our witness.”

And if you still don’t understand why we smile when we say it?

“We’re the afterlife of their silence.
And they fear our heaven.”

They fear a heaven where the enslaved are not erased,
but enthroned.
Where the whip-cracker is not the moral standard,
but the fossil.
Where freedom is not begged for—
but remembered as inheritance.

They fear our heaven because in it,
their systems don’t work.

– Where capitalism can’t auction souls.
– Where Christianity can’t be used as a collar.
– Where policing can’t disguise itself as peace.
– Where labor doesn’t mean extraction.
– Where patriotism isn’t a muzzle.
– Where Black joy isn’t suspect.
– Where history isn’t flinching from our names.

Juneteenth spits in the face of all of it.

It spits on the plantation, the Confederacy, the apology tour,
the “get over it” crowd, the textbook rewriters,
and the systems still running on stolen breath.

“Juneteenth doesn’t just say ‘We made it.’
It says you didn’t stop us.”

So we say Happy Juneteenth—
with the full weight of survival in our throat,
with the ancestors dancing behind our teeth,
and with a joy loud enough to rattle the cages still hiding in law.

We are the reckoning.
We are the proof.
We are the praise.
And we are the fire they thought they buried.

It is spiritually spitting in that system’s face.