After the Gold Rush: The Battle of Juneteenth

Much of America these days exists as small pockets of like-minded people living in proximity to one another, and this goes for both urban and rural areas. This is known as The Big Sort, a phenomenon that began in the 1980s and now has become frequent behavior among families and individuals who are able to exercise choice as to where they live. Five years ago I moved from a large city to a rural community of about 18,000; our entire County is about the size of my former urban neighborhood. The rural population is spread out over nearly 1,000 square miles, while the city compresses that same number of people into 6 square miles – 160 times more dense.

I worked for the public schools in the city, and was closely involved with the arrivals, departures, preferences and stories of families as they made life choices. In my new home in the California Gold Country I am on the Board of a non-profit whose mission is to support people of color and a growing LGBTQ+ population in an area where neither group had felt welcome before.

As people uproot their families, or settle in a retirement spot, traditional factors – property values and housing costs, employment opportunities, health care, for families the quality of schools – are still the primary drivers of decision-making, but they are joined by a new set of characteristics – the political orientation of a place, which encapsulates how citizens feel about gun control, immigration, diversity, abortion, school curriculum, the economy and DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) training for adults in the workplace. It’s quite a load to consider when choosing a place to live, the underlying question being one of safety: will my children be safe here, will I be safe here? People are choosing where to live based on the political orientation of the region, and – of even greater importance – the reaction of locals to those who looked or believed differently.

Classrooms and Dental Chairs

My dentist, two towns over and about 12 miles from me, upon learning my zip code, told me: ‘You seem okay, but no way am I living near all those transplanted socialists.’ My particular census tract recently turned blue (Democrat) on the political spectrum: I describe us as 50% blue, 40% red and 10% fringe, and trending blue. When urban hippies went rural in the 1970s in this region, the locals enjoyed a 2-1 population advantage that had the feeling of an uneasy truce. In the past two decades, an influx of new arrivals, primarily retired urban professionals, have overtaken the locals. With the word out that socialists are running the place and no one is curbing the excesses of Critical Race Theory in the schools and DEI preaching in the workplace, folks whose allegiance is more in line with conservative thinking are not choosing to move here.

Ironically, folks of color are moving away as racial incidents pile up – some personal, some public, with angry graffiti, provocative symbols, visible political affiliations and outright verbal slurs casting an air of menace that eventually wears down some new arrivals, who had never experienced small town racism before – it can feel very personal in a place where everyone knows each other, and the rural threat has become something lodged in our consciousness from movies like Deliverance and Billy Jack.

Even as I experience this place of blended ideologies, we are “sorting” ourselves into monochromatic pods that quickly become isolated; students in elementary school in some places will have grown up not having known a liberal.

‘My kid got in trouble,’ the dentist confided, ‘when she asked in the middle of a discussion about elections, Why are liberals so stupid? It didn’t come from me,’ he said defensively.

‘Pretty advanced for a 9-year old,’ I said when there was a break on the work in my mouth. ‘Did anyone answer her?’

‘The teacher told her: Now Liliana, liberals are people too.’

On the way out, he caught me at the front desk and shook my hand, admitted: ‘It’s not fair, I know. I have you strapped into a chair and you can’t offer a rebuttal with all the hardware in your mouth, so I can put the whole agenda out there and you’re stuck.’

‘You’re giving away all your secrets.’ I told him. ‘I’m just letting you trip over your own two feet so when the time is right I’ll be ready.’

‘Ready for what?’ he asked, seeming nervous. ‘What time is right?’

Horse-Trading with The Enemy

My daughters grew up not having known a conservative, so I’m equally guilty of tribal isolation. But in my new home I occasionally work with a politically diverse group, and it’s satisfying when we have to produce something and actually accomplish it. I use different terms in our discussions, knowing that trigger words could set someone off. I have some trigger words that fire me up, I found out: high standards implies that we’re in a meritocracy, and it’s just the way it is if some groups dominate the upper echelon; standard English marginalizes anyone with an accent; local control allows communities to discriminate if enough people vote for a racist ordinance.

On a Task Force to write the High School District’s annual funding plan, me and a colleague from the non-profit were paired with two staunch conservative activists, the four of us comprising the Community category. The intense 60 year-old female from Protecting America’s Values (PAV) told me, ‘Last year the faculty had four training days and all four were about DEI. We’ve got kids who can’t read. Our test scores are abysmal. And our mostly white teaching staff spent 32 hours listening to each other complain about racism.’ Her fellow PAV participant, an avocado farmer in a suit and tie for some reason, took notes the whole day with a zealot’s intensity; no one was to get away with a stray comment undermining democracy. I felt like a street hustler: I’ll trade you two days of DEI training for extra math tutorial money and a recruitment visit from the Marines – we worked it out amicably; the other side was feeling less combative because there was no Student Council Anti-Racism Committee this year; a group had met with the Superintendent regularly the prior year, which caused an uproar – that Superintendent was no longer here.

Hearts and Minds

A good friend was selected to distribute government funding to remote regions of the State and part of the protocol was to contact the Board of Supervisors in each County to formally introduce them to the opportunity. She was placed on the public agenda for the regular 10AM weekday meeting in one rural county, and arrived to find 100 people in the County chambers, with a half-dozen signed up to speak, able to use the time their neighbors ceded to them to dominate about an hour of the proceedings. They didn’t want Sacramento’s money coming from a left-wing administration for “creative projects” – You know what that means, one fiery mother of three accused, pretty soon we’ll be having people who check – what’s it called – right, non-binary as their sex – these people will be in our classrooms and your 12-year old is coming home wondering if they’re a boy or a girl, and maybe you won’t even know that because the teachers are not allowed to tell you about your own child! One speaker had done some research on my friend. I heard you say you wanted to change hearts and minds, don’t try and deny it, you’re on YouTube, the owner of the hardware store drawled. Tell the governor this county says no thank you, our hearts and minds are just fine without your creativity money. The staffer who helped set up the visit, from his seat in a box adjacent to the Board dais, said through the microphone as my friend departed: I’m sorry we invited you.

She found a group in the County who could use the money and bypassed the elected officials and the angry mothers.

 After the Gold Rush

After the 1849 Gold Rush, the region supported thriving communities of African-Americans, Latinos and Asians, sizeable and prosperous but segregated; go further back to just before the Gold Rush and it can be seen where the Native-American population was overrun by a cohort of Europeans with guns and mutant germs and enough greed to power an #Occupy insurgence. That was less than 200 years ago, and a Native community that was once 8,000 is now only 150. The tribe is no longer recognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which means funding was cut off.  There was no money to pay the teachers they would need to revitalize their language and culture, no official recognition of territory or sovereignty, the very features that would help them regain federal designation.

Today, the African-American population of the region is below 1%; Asians tally 1.4%; Latinos, in the best statistics we can gather because of the Census Bureau’s definition of race, are at 8.4%. The Native population of 150 comes out to 0.15%. Slowly, the communities had dwindled.

The region takes its positon on politics very seriously, and the liberal positions of the newer arrivals, when expressed in rallies or marches, or in celebrations of holidays that didn’t exist a few years ago, have become targets of “counter-protests” that have resulted in a few physical confrontations, a show of weapons, and the flashing of gang signs. On certain days, in certain places, I will be glared at by the young boy bagging my groceries; he sneers when I say ‘Thanks.’ Sometimes they just sense which team I’m on.

A new chain store opened last year, and the local managers had some days in June set aside for Pride activities. The local veterans’ group organized a boycott. We already had three places that liberals did not go: a bar, an upscale restaurant and a retail store. That was the year June 14 became a problem: Flag Day in the middle of Pride month necessitated a transition for the one-day American flag installation, replacing the rainbow flags, which would be re-installed on June 15. The changeovers did not go well that first year. Pride Flags were thrown down and stomped on. Tensions were running high. Events were canceled for safety concerns.

The Season of Freedom

Consider the period between May 14 and July 4 each year:

May 14                                       Armed Forces Day

4th Monday in May                Memorial Day

June 1-30                                  Pride Month

June 5-15                                  High School Graduation Ceremonies

June 14                                     Flag Day

June 19                                     Juneteenth

June 20-22                              Summer Solstice

July 4                                       Independence Day

In a 50-day period, we have three national holidays, many observances and a remarkable mix of the old and the new. It looks like, in the best of all worlds, a time for unity and celebration. But the concept of this unifying season has not caught on. Flag Day hasn’t captured the liberal  imagination, Pride Month is only starting to be accepted, and that leaves Juneteenth as the holiday where we could hope to see all factions happily engaged.

In 2024, we would hope that the end of slavery is something everyone believes was an essential act that began the necessary elevation of a people to full citizenship. Delivering the freedom message two years after the fact to the final outpost in Galveston, Texas, where 250,000 slaves were freed in a single announcement from General Gordon Granger on June 19, 1865, will not be forgotten now that on June 19, 2021, 156 years after the fact, America celebrated the first Juneteenth National Independence Day.

The House vote to approve President Biden’s request for the holiday was 415-14, with two members not voting. California had two of the 14 “nay” votes; Texas had two “nay” and one non-voting tally. With a tumultuous election behind us, COVID and its ugly political split at least not active, here we were presented with a symbol, a historical moment, a concept that we would all rally behind: slavery finally abolished, at least officially.

Even if there were technical reasons some might vote “nay” for another national holiday (economic loss, confusion with 4th of July have been cited), given that it had overwhelming support, it would be a conciliatory gesture to vote “aye,” one part of a bridge that it was time we began building. But the two Californians chose to send a different message: they would stand against any recognition of America’s flaws, or even the moves to make them right – you can’t celebrate the redress of a wrong without admitting it happened. Our former President’s refusal to accept defeat in 2020 isn’t an isolated act: it is the culmination of a mindset that sees truth as a limiting factor and believes limits are to be smashed.

There may even be more sinister purposes at work here. It is possible that a Republican faction has made a pact to never vote in favor of a Democratic proposal – we have seen that before. With virtually no black voters in their Districts, they can play to their isolated base without fear of ramifications. The county in which my friend received such a hostile reception is within the jurisdiction of one of the representatives. They don’t want to build bridges. Expecting the peace gene to live somewhere in each man and woman would be naïve. But Juneteenth is here to stay and the celebrations are more joyous each year. That the newest national holiday illuminates a fractured and contentious America at this time in our history is only fitting, I suppose, as it took the truth two years to reach its final destination in 1865 – it will be a while until a new generation sits in the halls of power and perhaps holds a different view of history.

A few days after Juneteenth 2024, I was in a post office buying stamps, among other items. ‘What kind of stamps do you want?’ the postal clerk asked. I was about to reject the flag stamps before she even mentioned them. To my team, the flag stamps represented unthinking patriotism, an allegiance to aggression and xenophobia. But it struck me that I was rejecting those stamps the same mindless way Juneteenth had been rejected.

‘I’ll take twenty of the flag stamps,’ I said.

We have to realize: none of us, collectively, are going anywhere. The political left and right are going to exist in America far into the foreseeable future. Do my adversaries enrage me at times? Absolutely. But I don’t want to be the cohort of Americans who created an irreversible split that sends people off into corners to be with their own kind. Groups we agree have been treated unfairly have secured places on the calendar reminding us of their humanity – really, our common humanity – yet we see defaced symbols, hear threats of retaliation, and boycott businesses.

This doesn’t sit well with the ideals that brought America into existence in the first place. America invited all of us to the party, but here we are, tearing up the host venue. My mother raised me better than that. Whatever views are held, these are my neighbors. The other side are people too.