Forgiveness has atrophied in recent years as we pick apart the sins lying dormant in others’ closets while never examining our own.
Our society’s self-anointed holds judgment over others, not to encourage meaningful change but to inflict pain and seize power.
The infallible few have rebranded forgiveness, once a virtue, as an act of weakness and an attempt to conceal sinners’ actions.
They want us to believe forgiving abhorrent behavior means agreeing with it or minimizing its impact: This is simply not true.
On Juneteenth, short for June nineteenth, we are reminded of our nation’s greatest sin of slavery and its end after federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, in 1865 to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation.
The Biden administration made Juneteenth a federal holiday in 2021 for Americans to recognize a moment in history we moved in the direction of freedom for all.
As Americans, we celebrate liberty and independence from tyranny, and that’s what Juneteenth is all about.
Although slavery was a worldwide phenomenon, America’s ambition was to deviate from the norm in pursuit of freedom.
If we’re not all free, then none of us really is; we can’t have a truly free nation with tyranny for some.
Juneteenth is a celebration of our nation’s moral compass moving — toward behaving more righteously and attempting to become a more perfect union.
But there are people who want to perpetuate only one version of America as they stare into the past with a simplistic interpretation that satisfies their present-day narratives.
The modern progressive wants you to believe nothing has changed, racial progress is an illusion, and wanting to pursue forgiveness is white supremacy.
Take Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The New York Times 1619 Project.
“White Americans desire to be free of a past they do not want to remember, while Black Americans remain bound to a past they can never forget,” she insists.
Hannah-Jones and her ilk preach pessimism to entrench the American mind in racial nihilism, so we can only see the world in the worst possible light.
To her, the sum of our nation is a one-sided equation totaling the horrors we committed without the positives we’ve produced.
Progressives see Juneteenth as a way to guilt Americans about what we were rather than admiring what we came from.
Politicians and the upper class politicize the celebration of the last freedmen and freedwomen in our union, bastardizing our moment of jubilation in pursuit of their own power.
And as a reflex, their opponents discard this celebration of triumph because the people who promote it differ from them politically.
Some of them despise Joe Biden so much that anything with his stamp of approval gets their automatic disapproval.
Juneteenth shouldn’t have any political motivations or interpretations attached to it — that weaponizes a momentous time in history to drive a wedge between us all.
It forces people to take a side for or against it rather than understanding that Juneteenth is for us all.
The point of understanding history is to have humility about the human condition.
It’s possible that actions from the past can happen again, and they often do repeat themselves.
If we learned from history, we’d realize the people who weaponize the past to inflict pain or imply guilt by the association against people in the present often become the tyrants of the future.
If we are to move forward as a nation, we shouldn’t remain shameful of past activities we had no part — but we can remain vigilant to never repeat those mistakes.
We can celebrate the moments when we course-corrected and appreciate how far we’ve come.
And we can forgive flawed men because we’re just as capable of barbarism, and refusing to forgive fosters the same hatred we condemn in people from the past.
Our forgiveness muscle may have atrophied, but it’s not too late to rehabilitate it. Give it a try this Juneteenth.
Adam B. Coleman is the author of “Black Victim to Black Victor” and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing. Follow him on Substack: adambcoleman.substack.com.