Race, nation, and commemoration: Representations of the national Juneteenth holiday in news media

Abstract

In 2021, the federal government established Juneteenth, a day commemorating the end of slavery in the United States, as a national holiday. But the invention of a national Juneteenth tradition coincided with a period of heightened racial tension in America: Black Lives Matter resurged after the police killing of George Floyd, and conservative politicians waged battles against “Critical Race Theory” in schools. Conflicts arose over the legacies of the nation’s slave history and the practices of its national remembrance. This paper examines how representations of Juneteenth in news media contributed to its construction as a national holiday, shaped by factors including time and market. Findings from a mixed-method analysis of over 4,800 articles containing the term “Juneteenth” from 2018 through 2023 reveal its symbolic value and indicate that its framings varied over time and distinctively within Black, mainstream, and conservative news markets. The central story suggests that Juneteenth’s symbolic malleability enables its use for divergent purposes, providing an opportunity for some to contest the implicit racial exclusivity of the American metanarrative and for others to undermine and redirect contemporary race-consciousness toward maintaining the status quo of racial oppression and exclusion. This paper’s main contributions lie in (a) examining how pluralistic communities navigate memories potentially conflictual with their collective mythos and identity, (b) reinvigorating the connection between memory studies and political culture by emphasizing the racial politics that structure them both, and (c) demonstrating the importance of studying Black memory and the utility of computational text methods in memory studies.