Juneteenth, TV and Me: What to watch and read on America's least understood holiday

My list of cool TV shows, films and books to read for a modern understanding of what Juneteenth symbolizes

Juneteenth has always been a complicated holiday for me.

Celebrated on the day Union troops freed enslaved Black people in Texas -- two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation – it’s always been an example for me of America’s tortured history in recognizing the civil rights of non-white people.

As this story from the Washington Post notes, enslaved people in Texas probably already knew slavery had been abolished by the time troops reached them. But it took military force to push local communities into recognizing the law, rejecting centuries of oppressing Black people.

Much as we want to believe the nation’s drive toward freedom is a straight line through the end of enslavement, past legal segregation into the restoration of voting rights, the truth has always been more complicated: America’s movement toward equality is fitful and prone to backlash. Watching how some are championing the end of diversity and inclusion programs which help feed that equality – like the Trump administration’s move to fire a pioneering figure like Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden – leaves me little doubt we are living in the throes of one of those backlash periods.

I have always felt that backlash was rooted in fear and guilt. People who fear that they and others like them, members of their tribe, will somehow be held back, degraded or made to feel guilty by the emancipation of others.

But my work evaluating TV and media over 30 years tells a different story. Storytelling, subject matter, performances, production are all enhanced by breaking down the system which keep the most talented people from reaching the front lines of every profession and every public problem. Recent documentaries like Hulu’s Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything or Apple TV+’s Number One on the Call Sheet, dramatically prove that demolishing barriers to women and people of color in journalism and show business have given us the biggest stars and best results.

So, with all that in mind, here’s my list of TV shows, books and films which come to mind when I think of Juneteenth. Rather than offer dusty history lessons, these projects present new ways of thinking about history, race, media and more.

Stony the Road the book and the PBS documentary, Reconstruction: America After the Civil War, by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

I had the great pleasure of interviewing Skip Gates at the South By Southwest EDU festival about his work, which talks in detail, not just about Reconstruction, but on a period in America called The Redemption. Much as people like to focus on how Black Americans got expanded rights in the Reconstruction period right after the end of the Civil War, that was followed by The Redemption, where rights were systemically taken from Black people until we hit the Jim Crow Era of segregation in the South.

Gates is a master at making important history accessible outside academia, and it wasn’t until I spent time with him that I truly realized how much of what we struggle with today – from overpolicing of non-white people to continued segregation of schools and the exploitation of incarcerated people to create commerce for big companies – comes from practices and strategies adopted during and just after the Civil War. I’m glad so many have discovered Skip through his excellent PBS series Finding Your Roots, but for me, his work in explaining America’s tortured past and present with African Americans through history remains his most important impact.

Between the World and Me, the book AND the HBO film, by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

I’ve always been a bigger fan of his book We Were Eight Years in Power, examining what he calls the “fear of good Negro government” which might undercut typical anti-Black prejudices and fueled a backlash following Barack Obama’s time as president. But Between the World and Me was also a spellbinding book and HBO film, framed as a letter to his son, alternating between observation and instruction on the way to survive being Black in a world that seeks to dominate and often extinguish Black bodies. The film unfolds like a tone poem - dreamily lyrical in some moments and brutally vivid in others, with Coates words read by a supreme thespian, Joe Morton. It is, as I once said in a review, “a meditation on the stubborn spirit of a people who thrive in a world too often determined to erase them.”

And just one more shout out to Coates, who provides the best answer to a question about who should use the n-word I have seen in a while.

The Underground Railroad, the book AND Prime Video limited series, by Colson Whitehead (book) and Barry Jenkins (series).

I completely understand the perspective of Black folks who have tired of watching TV shows and films centered on the brutalization of enslaved people. But, as I wrote in my review of Jenkins’ ambitious, beautifully brutal, 10-episode adaptation of Whitehead’s book The Underground Railroad, this show offered an “emotional journey that touched every nerve of what it feels like to be a person of color striving to matter in America.” It’s a visceral and jarring narrative filled with brutal images. But it also employs surrealism and magical realism to touch on everything from the many ways black people struggle to process trauma to role white jealousy plays in the drive to oppress Black people and the insidious way white culture convinces Black people to work toward their own oppression and the oppression of others. It’s an amazing and impressive encapsulation of all the themes raised by the Juneteenth holiday.

13^th the Netflix documentary, by Ava DuVernay

This is what I wrote on Tumblr about Ava’s towering documentary: ”The story of American law enforcement’s overpolicing of black people stretches back to a loophole left in both the Emancipation Proclamation and the Constitution’s 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude. The loophole: You can be forced into hard labor to work off a jail sentence. DuVernay’s insightful documentary traces how that has curdled into a modern law enforcement system which unfairly jails people of color in astonishing numbers, fed by stereotypes about black criminality and bruising criminal justice bureaucracies.” As I noted above, this is another way the fallout from The Redemption after the Civil War has come to define modern problems and current issues with the systemic oppression of Black people.

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