On Juneteenth

Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 2021

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

The Role of Education in Perpetuating Historical Narratives

Throughout On Juneteenth, Gordon-Reed emphasizes that US and Texas education play an integral role in indoctrinating students with certain ideas about the past. She points out inclusions, omissions, and the reasons for both, demonstrating that what is included in and what is left out of taught historical narratives work in tandem to produce and perpetuate historical narratives that give people a manufactured sense of themselves in the present. She provides several examples of historical narratives that are taught in school settings alongside other significant stories and details that add to their complexity but are nonetheless excluded from history classes. Her main point is that the production and perpetuation of sanitized narratives diminishes the complexity of past events and peoples that would produce a richer analysis and interpretation of the past and therefore understanding of the present.

In Chapter 5, Gordon-Reed notes that although people of the past were deeply concerned about race and race relations, as evidenced by historical archives, there has been a concerted effort to de-emphasize the role of race and racism in the development of the United States. She points to the evasion of race in the historical narratives of school textbooks as a primary example of this concerted effort (107). Gordon-Reed notes the sanitized narratives and what she has learned through family/community discussion and her career as a historian. For example, in Chapter 1, she notes what she learned in Texas history classes about the development of Texas as a region of Mexico, an independent republic, and a state, with the primary emphasis being on Texans’ resistance to a strong central government. However, the centrality of slavery to Texas’s development in all its iterations was rarely, if ever, mentioned in her public school education, although she knew about it from family and community. In Chapter 3, she discusses the Plymouth and Jamestown narratives. Although the Plymouth story is emphasized in American education more than the Jamestown story, particularly because the Plymouth story “gives Americans a founding story about a valiant people leaving their homes to escape religious persecution and founding a new society in the wilderness” (58), both contain elements of English and Indigenous cooperation and intermixture that obscure the violence of settler colonialism and massive disruption to Indigenous populations. Furthermore, they place US origins at a point after which other Europeans and Africans had already begun exploration and settlement of the North American continent.

Similarly, in Chapter 4, she mentions what she learned about the Quanah Parker narrative, demonstrating once again that it serves the purpose of absolving white people of the violence of settler colonialism by emphasizing cooperation and intermixture. Here, Gordon-Reed also calls attention to the war tactics of Indigenous people and the patriarchal underpinnings that are integral to the kidnapping of Quanah Parker’s mother and her subsequent inclusion into the historical narrative because of her relation to powerful men (79-80). In Chapter 5, she discusses the Battle of the Alamo and its legendary status in Texas and American history. She notes the Alamo narrative is so popular she knew about it even prior to history classes. What she did not learn in school was Jim Bowie’s connection to slave trading, William Barret Travis’s personal history of abandoning his wife and children to escape legal repercussions for debt, or the story of the “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Regarding the “Yellow Rose of Texas,” she points out that it would “not have fit in either my fourth- or seventh-grade Texas history classes” (114) because of its sexual aspects, taboos around interracial sex, and the idea that people of color were present and active during such a legendary moment.

With attention to both the inclusions and the omissions, these examples demonstrate the particular versions of history that get perpetuated in classrooms diminish the complexity of the past and the people involved in it. The stories serve people’s sense of themselves in the present, so the events and people of the past are flattened so (white) people in the present can preserve certain ideas and justifications for how and why the United States came to be as well as the power and privilege they enjoy in the American social, political, and economic order. After all, education contains “an explicit mission of race uplift” (50), suggesting that white Anglo-Americans constructed the historical canon to perpetuate a belief in white supremacy. Furthermore, the exclusion of people of color avoids acknowledgement of the varied perspectives and experiences that would allow students to view history outside of the limited white Anglo-American perspective. School systems play a large role in maintaining these limited and flattened interpretations of history, and Gordon-Reed demonstrates this with her discussions of what she did and did not learn in Texas schools.

The Contingent Nature of History

Another important theme throughout On Juneteenth is the contingent nature of history, meaning understanding history’s unfolding and how people have arrived in the present requires attention to the deliberate choices people of the past made as well as how the positions and choices of those in the present color interpretations of the past. The dialogical relationship between past and present, then, implies analyzing history is a dynamic process that “requires a degree of attachment” (116) as well as the fluidity to move with its revisions as “new information comes to light” (107).

Gordon-Reed looks to race and race relations as primary evidence of this contingency. For example, in Chapter 1, she notes that “nothing is inevitable. Things could have been different. The choice for slavery was deliberate […]” (27). That is, while slavery was central to the development of Texas specifically and the US generally, that choice to build a slave-based economy and society was deliberate. For example, Stephen F. Austin came to Texas with a vision of building Anglo-American wealth through a plantation system modeled after the plantations he observed in Mississippi (22-23). In addition, the decisions to rebel against Mexico during the Texas Revolution and against the Union during the American Civil War were deliberately for the preservation of slavery (24-25). Again, in Chapter 5, she points out the intentional choice of the Republic of Texas’s founders to establish a white republic in which African-descended people could exist only as enslaved people, and any other free people of color, including Indigenous Americans, were not welcome to citizenship at all (105-106). In Chapter 3, she discusses how Jamestown was “created more openly as an economic venture” (59) that “would make Virginia a full-fledged slave society, the largest and richest of the thirteen colonies” (59). This economic venture based on slave labor was a choice in the founding of America.

These examples also demonstrate how this contingency can be missed when historical narratives are constructed to communicate not facts but rather partial fictions that tell “us what kind of people we believe we are, what kind of nation we believe we live in” (58). Perpetuating the narrative that the Texas Revolution and the American Civil War were about federalism-based concerns or avoiding race at all in historical study even though it is central to the historical documents, attempts to hide that slavery was a chosen path, particularly one towards white people’s wealth, control, and identity in society. The preference for the Plymouth story over the Jamestown story in terms of the United States’ origin and especially the element of friendly Indigenous people is fueled by the need for vindication from the atrocities that settler colonialism and slavery inflicted on people of color as well as their legacies that continue today. The attachment to certain ideas in the present about what “America” stands for or what it means to have a certain racial identity requires that a linear and direct path be drawn from past to present, which is only possible when the complexities are diminished by excluding voices that would complicate a singular idea.

Thus, recognizing the contingent nature of history requires examining how the present informs historical interpretation and whose perspective is communicated by that interpretation. In Chapter 4, Gordon-Reed acknowledges the need “to keep in mind that our view is colored by the knowledge of how things turned out” (82) when discussing the assumption that there should have been some “natural” alliance between African American and Indigenous people since they share a common oppressor (83). She notes how superimposing the racial thinking of her time on the past would lead her to such a conclusion in addition to acknowledging this sense of racial alliance was forged out of the African American experience as a measure of self-defense (83). Again, this points to the idea that choices have been made in the past and are being made in the present to produce certain outcomes and interpretations, respectively, both of which inform each other.

Therefore, perspective matters in terms of unraveling what purpose historical narratives serve, so asking what ideas historical narratives communicate means asking from whose perspective that story is being told. In Chapter 5, Gordon-Reed questions the purpose of the “Yellow Rose of Texas,” suggesting it perpetuates myths about the depravity of interracial sex and the promiscuity of Black women (114). In Chapter 6, she discusses the Dunning School of interpretation, noting its prevalence in historical narratives of the Reconstruction Era (130). The chief question raised by the underlying ideas of the “Yellow Rose of Texas” and the Dunning School’s sympathy to white supremacy is: who does this story serve? Undoubtedly, they serve the white Anglo-American men who have constructed such narratives based on how they see themselves and everyone else. Again, there are choices being made in the present to perpetuate narratives in a particular way, which must be considered when examining history.

Thus, this contingency of history plays a central role in Gordon-Reed’s analysis because she clarifies what those choices have been in the past, what they are in the present, and how they are mutually informing when it comes to the presentation of history. She suggests this contingency comes to light when multiple perspectives and experiences are considered rather than only the ones that have dominated and been presented as factual and objective.

The Centrality of Patriarchy to White Supremacy and Racism

Another underlying theme in On Juneteenth is the centrality of patriarchy to the contingency and presentation of history, and more specifically the way patriarchy and white supremacy work in tandem to perpetuate each other. In Chapter 1, Gordon-Reed posits that the personifications of Texas in the public imagination are the Cowboy, the Rancher, and the Oilman (18). Although she acknowledges why and how these popular images emerged, she also notes they are not representative of the entire Texas population. She writes, “Of great importance, as I have said in another context, the image of Texas has a gender and a race: ‘Texas is a White man.’ What that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man is part of what I hope to explore in the essays of this book” (18). With this, Gordon-Reed makes it immediately apparent that there is an interaction between racialized and gendered identities that impacts the presentation of Texas history specifically and US history more generally.

Beyond the caricatures of the Cowboy, the Rancher, and the Oilman, the real historical figures who are given attention and made into legendary and heroic figures are all white men. Examples include Stephen F. Austin, Sam Houston, Jim Bowie, and William Barret Travis. While the idea of Texas as a white male-dominated society does, in fact, have historical antecedents—such as Austin being dubbed the “Father of Texas” for his development of the region into a white Anglo-American slave owning society, or the reality that Houston served as president of the Texas Republic and represented Texas as a United States Senator—the emphasis on these white men to the exclusion of all others perpetuates the idea that the white men have been the only influential actors in Texas history. Naming entire cities and institutions after them also promotes this idea. However, as Gordon-Reed demonstrates in her discussions of origin myths and the creation of heroic figures:

A supreme risk with myths and legends of whatever kind is that we easily fall in love with the people who are in them, as if we know them. People we actually know come to us with all sorts of good and bad characteristics that become apparent upon repeated contact. We weigh them, sometimes on a daily basis, and determine whether the good outweighs the bad and we wish to continue with the person. That’s hard to do with a historical subject […] Idealizing an individual one doesn’t know personally usually involves taking the things that one admires and making them embody the individual as a whole (108).

What Gordon-Reed notes here is the collapse of historical figures’ complexity into flattened images. Men like Austin, Houston, Bowie, and Travis become idealized, and in that process not only do they become infallible but so too do the people who see themselves reflected in these historical figures: white men in the present. The contingency of history becomes important here. Like a racialized hierarchy, a gendered hierarchy is also a choice. In other words, “Not that the path had to have been followed—that’s never it—but it is important to know what paths were taken, and why” (107). Since the choices of the past and the choices of the present are always interacting with one another, it is important to note the presentation of white male founding fathers and heroic figures are deliberate and serve a particular purpose, that is the preservation of white male power through the suggestion that they are naturally dominant and their domination throughout history is justified.

The perpetuation of white supremacist and patriarchal ideology through historical narrative and legal policy then suggests the two have been used together to maintain white male power. In Chapter 2, Gordon-Reed suggests patriarchy is not simply about the subjugation of women but also about competition between men (46). Therefore, access to women and the ability to dominate them and restrict access to them is an emblem of that patriarchal power. The discussion in Chapter 2 on white men’s violent responses to interracial relationships between Black men and white women is case in point of white supremacy and patriarchy being used in tandem to maintain a particular social order and allocation of power. She notes that the white women involved in these interracial relationships also faced violence from their white husbands and white community, violence that produced the pressure to claim they had been raped.

Even when a broader view is taken, meaning seeing patriarchy outside of the ways it is wielded by white men throughout history, there is still some benefit for white men to be gleaned. For example, in the case of the Quanah Parker narrative, Gordon-Reed makes an important point regarding Cynthia Parker:

I get the distinct impression that the prominence of Parker’s husband and son shaped the presentation of how she ended up as part of the Comanche community in the first place. Parker’s life is judged by the men to whom she was attached: a powerful and important husband and a powerful and important son. That she was kidnapped is fine because she married well (85).

Gordon-Reed’s consideration of the gender dynamics at play in Cynthia Parker’s story not only points to “issues of consent, sexual predation, and sexual assault” (85) or “the problem with kidnapping girls to make them brides” (85) in a larger societal context, but it also draws attention to the way the presentation of the narrative makes Parker, a white woman, a sacrifice for the maintenance of white male domination. The devaluation of her autonomy over her actual person—the idea that autonomy does not matter because she is merely a piece of property and a pawn to be traded—is present here precisely because the narrative does the work of tempering the realities of settler colonial violence with “examples of cooperation and, even, intermixture between the contending forces” (79). Thus, while patriarchy is a global issue not restricted to white society, it is used by white men in a particular way to reinforce white supremacy.

Thus, the patriarchal underpinnings of Texas and American society require attention for a rounder, fuller analysis of history. Specifically, this historical analysis requires an eye to the way that patriarchy and white supremacy interact to produce differential experiences for sectors of society as well as how the goal of that interaction has been the construction and maintenance of white male domination, including the use of historical narrative to communicate ideas about and justifications for white male domination. Thus, reading On Juneteenth calls for the backdrop of patriarchy to be kept in mind, even as the discussion emphasizes race and racism.