The nation is celebrating a holiday that most people have no clue what it means. At its best, Juneteenth is a muted occasion … tinged more in sadness than in joy. And in this era when Black issues don’t matter, I guess how the holiday unfurled this year isn’t unexpected.

For those absent an understanding of it, Juneteenth grew out of what Union Major Gen. Gordon Granger did when, 160 years ago, he issued General Order No. 3 in Galveston, Texas. His edict ended the enslavement of millions of Blacks in Texas who were unaware the South had lost.

While slaves elsewhere were already freed, those in Texas weren’t … rather, they didn’t know they were freed. So, historically, Blacks in the South commemorated the day for decades, long before it caught the attention of Blacks in the North.

As a friend of mine wrote on Facebook: Growing up in Cleveland, I never knew anything about Juneteenth. In fact, the first time I heard about Juneteenth and what the holiday was about wasn’t until a few weeks after I graduated college in 1992 when I was in Kansas City looking an apartment ahead of starting my first job. I was with (a friend) and he took me to a park where all of these Black people were celebrating like it was the Fourth of July.

I was like him, though I came to knowing about Juneteenth much later. I’d heard people mention it, but I never bothered to ask about it. I still don’t spend much time dwelling on it, because even the freedom that came with it carried Black people down a road as littered with injustices like those they found in slavery.

Freedom?

As a Black man in America, I barely know that word. For all the things freedom promised, it didn’t fulfill most of them. Instead of slavery, America has warehoused Blacks in prisons in the 2000s, denying them rights the U.S. Constitution, a document crafted in the 1700s to disenfranchise my people, afforded them even after they’ve paid for their crimes.

In this America, it’s all right for white men to steal millions; it’s not all right for Black men to steal hundreds. In this America, it’s all right for white men to go to elite schools; it’s not all right for Black men to attend those same schools. In this America, it’s all right for white families to talk about generational wealth; it’s more appropriate for Black families to talk about how the rent will get paid or the cupboards stocked with food.

Celebrate Juneteenth?

Perhaps it’s best to mourn it. What good does it do to celebrate an historic moment that didn’t give Black folks what freedom was supposed to give them?

Thinking about the occasion today, I looked out my front window and saw the dreariness of a June day of cloud and rain, a reflection, if you ask me, of the drab state of affairs in America. I don’t see these times as splashed in sunshine.

I’m certain others see Juneteenth and the United States through a different lens. Maybe their world is sunny and prosperous — their hopes, dreams and great expectations absent limits or deadlines.

As whites of the Trumpian sort continue to whitewash history, continue to paint the past in Crayola colors as bright, as merry and as audacious as the houses on “Rainbow Row” in Charleston, South Carolina, or in the grand “Painted Ladies” of San Francisco, I’ve come to loathe their paintbrushes.

While they might want to draw a Juneteenth celebration for me, I’d prefer a fairer slice of the American pie.