Ice cream cake for Juneteenth (White Savior Day)

by philg

A Swiss friend got this together for Juneteenth last year:

Chocolate and vanilla together. A rainbow of sprinkles on top #BecausePrideMonth.

A comment from last year on Happy Juneteenth for government workers:

Juneteenth is the ultimate holiday for White Supremacy — it signals that blacks were incapable of independently securing their own freedom. They needed white men to fight other white men to free the hapless blacks from slavery. The account of Lincoln coming upon blacks worshipping him as he visited the just-conquered Richmond is embarrassing to read. He begged them to get off their knees, quit their unbecoming adulation, and conduct themselves as free men.

The darker the skin colour, the less woke the person. In the same vein, the whiter the crowd, the more woke the sentiment. Wokeness is a group dynamic, not an individual phenomena. Wokeness demands group support to maintain itself.

The commenter raises a good point. Instead of a holiday celebrating an achievement by a Black person or by Black people, the holiday celebrates the actions of literal white saviors (white folks who wanted to rule the entire North American continent and therefore did not want the South to secede). Should tomorrow be called White Savior Day?

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37 thoughts on “Ice cream cake for Juneteenth (White Savior Day)”

  1. Google rewards the search for “Juneteenth” (cleared cookies, private window) with a confetti parade and marching Black people.

    No whites celebrate in the animation. This is in line with Google’s DiAngelo CRT brand, which posits that all whites are irredeemably racist (if you deny it, you are even more racist!).

    It is unclear whether the search term improves one’s social credit score.

    • That is a beautiful animation! I hope they hire the same artists for other animations. “Trump” as a search term could yield a Nazi march.

  2. Whenever I celebrate a real holiday or make a special gift to a group of people, I visit a (very) small local Italian bakery, established and family-run for a couple of generations now, and I just order something really good. They make great Red Velvet cakes but so much more. I’ve done this twice now for various Diverse medical teams and they’ve absolutely loved the gift. From watching the expressions on their faces as they opened the cake boxes and ate what was inside, I’m confident in saying:

    “Make sure to thank the people who work hard to care for you in your time of need.”

    As for Juneteenth, I don’t celebrate it. I’ll be working on that day. I know that NPR will be talking about it for the rest of the weekend, but I figure that my best contribution on Juneteenth will be to continue working so that hopefully our economy doesn’t get worse than it is already getting.

    • Sometimes I get cynical and think that academics who are comfortably ensconced in our University system invent holidays just because they can. You know…it takes a few years, but they work their networks….

      This gives them the time and space to write more stuff in newspapers and op-eds, and sell books at bookstores and on Amazon, which they can then add to their résumé and get speaking gigs and research assistant money to continue talking about the holidays they’ve invented. Then they can teach courses about it!

      Am I wrong? Is it just a self-fulfilling prophesy with some capitalist ginning-up?

  3. I always considered leftism to be a form of sublimated masochism. These people WANT to be bossed around. They crave security of being controlled and relief from making choices and facing consequences. There is no other explanation for their obsession with conformity, regimentation, Party discipline, and worship of Dear Leaders.

    The historical roots of leftism are in ascetic monastic cults (the medieval utopian authors went positively S&M-fiction pornographic describing their ideal monastic societies, and the modern utilitarianism – as pioneered by Jeremy Bentham – directly borrows from that, complete with total surveillance – see Panopicon). And don’t forget the direct role of Marquis de Sade in the French Revolution – from calling for Bastille to be destroyed to becoming a far-left member of National Assembly.

    • What I’ve noticed most pointedly is the tendency to “run to authority” – especially among liberal and leftist women that I’ve known (and loved.) They won’t fight their own battles – it’s always about ratcheting the problem up the “food chain” so that they’re protected by the next governmental demigod they have above them.

      Then they invert that and weaponize it.

      They couch this in the language of power politics because they see themselves as endless victims, and of course the only option is to “take it upstairs” and – instead of solving the problem – invent a new Cause of Action. It reaches a point where even the smallest criticism, the tiniest “trigger” or the most innocuous comment becomes a potential lawsuit, and they dig for that, because it makes them money.

      They can’t cope, they can’t deal, they are also incompetent but they have a weapon they use relentlessly – which is to take it up the ladder and fry your balls.

    • The Dean of the Law School I worked for in Chicago had a cartoon stuck on her office door that – had our places and genders been reversed – been an INSTANT reason to toss me out of that office. She had a cartoon that showed men bowing down to a woman, groveling at her feet. When I first took the job, I kind of disregarded it, but after a few times being told: “Don’t confuse me with the facts, Alex!” I came to realize that’s how she really thought.

      It’s too bad. I did my best for her and she still basically killed herself.

    • It’s about reversing what they view as historical injustice by creating a superstructure that protects them from even the worst of their own decisions. It makes it impossible to raise serious questions about their competency because, if you do so particularly as a white male, you’re a monster. It’s no surprise to me that Bezos and Gates have divorced and given their former wives billions of dollars – otherwise they’d be paupers – or criminals, and I’m quite sure of that. Something would be invented. Those guys paid with their Billions to get the hell out.

    • @averros: I even have some sympathy for the Devil, Bill Gates. You know, he *did* really make Microsoft what it was – even if that came with a lot of help along the way. I remember the day after their divorce was announced listening to NPR’s commentators lick their chops over where Melinda’s booty would get spent. If I was Gates, I would probably have done the same thing: at least save SOME of the money from being tossed into the trash, for Pete’s sake.

      So far I think only Larry Ellison has emerged relatively unscathed. I have idea no idea how he does it.

      https://youtu.be/Mnb_3ibUp38?t=113

    • > Party discipline, and worship of Dear Leaders.

      please explain Republicans and Trump then?

    • Anonymous: The term “Dear Leader” usually implies the chairman of a communist party like Mao. Perhaps it should be applied to any authoritarian party with “socialist” in its name …

      The people who venerate Trump (I’m not one of them — I just think his actual policies are among the best in the past two decades, but people only look at tweets …) do so because he stands for individualism and non-conformity.

      Not anyone who is venerated is a “Dear Leader”.

    • @Anonymous: I’ve been a steadfast and consistent voice arguing that Trump was, in fact, his own worst enemy, and I’ve been at times a ferocious critic of the way he ran things during his Administration. It was *always* preordained that he was going to be under relentless attack from the moment he was sworn in, but in my view he made many mistakes along the way that with just a small amount of adjustment on his part could have been *completely* avoided. That is why I don’t support him now. There are a lot of other people who feel the same way. It’s very hard getting “through” to him, and I’ve tried.

    • @Anonymous: It’s beyond the scope of this blog to discuss the reasons why in terms of his past and his psychology, but I think that at some point Trump lost the capacity to understand the difference between Constructive and Destructive Criticism. Any criticism came to be viewed as an attack. He lost the capacity to understand when someone was trying to *help* him. That’s very dangerous, because no person on this Earth can possibly sit as President of the United States without being able to accept some constructive criticism and advice meant to tell them: “Jesus, don’t drive down that road, you’ll get wrecked!”

      I think he lost at least 10 million votes – more than anyone could have stolen – because of it.

      He dismissed, discouraged and demoralized a lot of people who wanted to help him before he stepped on the landmine, so to speak. There’s a streak of megalomania there. He came to believe too much of his own propaganda.

    • @alex

      Absolutely, but this is really about Trump’s followers, not him. averros claims key differentiators of leftism are “Conformity, Party discipline, and worship of Dear Leaders.” yet these are all strong traits of Republicans.

      @explainer If worshipping a right-wing populist is different than worshipping a “Dear Leader”, in what practical way?

    • Anon: One worship is organic, the other one is top-down mandated.

      I disagree with characterizing Trump as a “right-wing” populist.

      Currently, the Democrats are the party of big business, totalitarian press control, undocumented immigrant slaves for the households of rich Democrats, persecution of political enemies and journalists like Assange, nepotism jobs in Ukraine etc.

      (Support for press freedom now comes from the “right-wing”:

      https://nitter.net/RepMTG/status/1537875616854290432#m)

      They essentially do everything that a 1960s leftist would have accused the Republicans of doing, except that they put a populist layer (BLM, LGBTQ, …) on top of that to distract the fools.

      Perhaps you need to be populist in the U.S. in order to get voters to drag themselves to the voting box. Trump is using MAGA, the Democrats are using a “new” fake social justice movement or a manufactured crisis every 6 months.

      Look at what they do, not what they say.

    • I don’t understand how Republican voters can be considered mindless followers of instructions from party leaders. Party leaders told them not to vote for Trump who, for one thing, was a Democrat for nearly all of his adult life. Yet Trump prevailed in primary elections over the officially endorsed candidates.

    • @Anonymous: > Conformity, Party discipline, and worship of Dear Leaders.” yet these are all strong traits of Republicans.

      It’s a bit like the pot calling the kettle black sometimes, isn’t it? Actually as philg points out, at the beginning of the whole Trump Thang, scores of Conservatives and Republicans were totally opposed to his ascendency. They didn’t want to see him become the President. David Brooks called him “a clown” on National Public Radio (and that’s when I knew he was going to be big.)

      Trump’s movement is legitimate: he found a lot of people who legitimately agreed with him. I just think he made a lot of needless mistakes that cost him a second term. There’s always “one step too far” and Trump made a couple of those. Particularly in Georgia. He fucked up bigtime there and if he has any sense at all, he’ll recognize that and take it to heart.

      But also, if you look at the final vote margins in other important states, he lost by a pittance. He pushed away JUST ENOUGH people to lose. Dumb.

    • philg: I don’t think you can use primaries, which by nature are insular voting blocks, as a good example here. How many of those “party leaders” didn’t fall in line and endorse him for the general election?

      He insulted Ted Cruz’s wife in rather unflattering ways, and he still backed him to the hilt.

    • @Anonymous —

      Although you can always find some over-enthusiastic hero-worshipers in any political movement, the vast majority of Trump base voted for him not because of liking or worshiping the man (he’s crass, he’s obnoxious, he’s narcissistic, he’s not very bright), but simply because he was not “one of them”. The epitome of establishment, Hillary, is so much hated that if instead of Trump there was a devil with horns and hooves, that devil would’ve gathered just as many votes.

      What leftists fail to understand (their heads being firmly stuck in their smug echo chamber of their collective butt) is that more than half of US population absolutely loathes them. The vote for Trump was the vote against them and everything they stand for. The whole enthusiasm for Trump is based solely on his talent as a Level 80 troll – driving the Left totally nuts and flushing out the psychopathy and insanity of American Left into the open.

      The current sentiment in GOP base is “we hope Trump won’t run again” and “looks like DeSantis is our best option”. So much for Dear Leader worship, LOL. Unfortunately, GOP is seriously fragmented between the “establishment” part – neocons and other imperial psychopaths – and the paleo/constitutionalist/libertarian grass-roots.

    • @averros your entire political philosophy is based on trolling your opponents, rather than effective governance? That sounds pretty stupid to me.

      > Unfortunately, GOP is seriously fragmented

      So conformity is a good thing now?

    • “So conformity is a good thing now?”

      Are you talking to the voices in your head now?

    • @philg why would low income working class people worry about depressed wages? You’ve assured us any American can get free housing, cellphone and live a decent life without working at all.

    • @avveros

      “I always considered leftism to be a form of sublimated masochism. These people WANT to be bossed around. They crave security of being controlled and relief from making choices and facing consequences. There is no other explanation for their obsession with conformity, regimentation, Party discipline, and worship of Dear Leaders.”

      Sorry you can’t keep straight what you say. You claim leftists are obsessed w/ conformity and party discipline, then complain about the lack of it in your own party.

    • @philg — The whole “rich” vs “poor” division is Marxist framing. Straight-out communist hatred of anyone more successful. Buy and large, leftism is an ideology of envy.

      The real class division in American society is not between rich and poor – it’s between productive people (including entrepreneurs and capitalists) vs parasites (Big Government, Big Military, Big Banks, Big Oligopolistic Business, and the permanent class of unemployables kept as the pets and justification for robbery of the productive). This division is sustained by the government and the smallish clique of kleptocrats who actually own the government (the “democracy” is a total window dressing – it’s not a democracy when your choices are constrained between different flavors of pre-selected psychopaths and criminals).

      The productive class are people who produce something other people are VOLUNTARILY paying for. The parasites are those who take by force (that includes government and all these businesses which benefit from government force (primarily regulations designed to exclude competition, shield from liability, or create unnatural “property” rights – patents, etc), those who “legally” steal by fraud (the entire banking system in US is fraudulent, and it takes incessant effluvia of hordes of court “economists” to obfuscate this fact), and those who receive stolen goods (the permanent underclass – illegals, BIPOC ghetto dwellers, bums, etc).

      The issue with migration is not about who gets richer, but about slow-motion cultural suicide (“diversity” destroys cohesiveness of a society – willingness and ability to acculturate and integrate into the host society must be a criterion for permitting permanent residency) and the never-ending increase of the parasite underclass. Then, there’s the whole issue of laws – when a migrant starts his life in the new country by breaking its laws, it’s not the kind of a person anyone would want to have in a neighborhood. You can disagree with the immigration laws (I do – they are totally stupid) but you don’t want to have people who willingly break the laws as your neighbors. The proper way of dealing with immigration issues is to change the laws, not to empower executive branch to ignore the laws. But, then, with all the leftist B.S. about “democracy” what they really support and do is naked authoritarianism – immigration is just one aspect of it.

  4. If the emancipation of the enslaved people of African descent who built up the wealth of these capitalist United States over 200 plus years isn’t reason for celebration, I don’t know what is. The United States currently consume about 24% of the world’s energy (at 5% of the population), are about 40% obese, and are on the brink of becoming a fascist state. Not so great compared to many other, more humane, progressive and healthy, countries in this world. The emancipation of American enslaved people whose families originated in Africa is highly worth celebrating, in my opinion. The current, bloated, arrogant, self-deluded, violent, unhealthy, greedy, union of large territories that was achieved on the backs of enslaved people, aggression and cheating, called the United States of America, is not. Happy Juneteenth! I hope you all figure out how to properly celebrate this long-overdue, uniquely AMERICAN holiday.

  5. First, I would like to change the adjective “American” to “United Statesian” (whether or not it is a recognized word). There are many countries in the Americas, and they are all American. My apologies. Second, although I am not familiar with all of Cuba’s holidays, I profoundly hope there is one to celebrate the emancipation of their ancestors who were enslaved people of African descent. Apparently, American businessmen (no doubt some women too) were more than happy to collude with the powers that were in Cuba to continue importing and exploiting enslaved labor long after that overseas trade officially ended in the United States. Until Fidel Castro’s revolution, the United States profited handsomely from the degenerate, inhumane treatment of human beings in Cuba. So, yes, if Cuba does not have a holiday celebrating the end of official slavery there, I am pushing hard for it now.

    • Let us know how if Miguel Díaz-Canel acts on order from American party members or at least rep0onds better then Fidel and Raul Castro. At least Fidel Castro did not right away support USSR invasion of Czechoslovakia, unlike Miguel Díaz-Canel’s support for Russian invasion of Ukraine.

  6. @Jennifer Gittes Taplin,

    No nation or civilization, current or in the past is guiltfree of slavery. Even today slavery is still rampant [1] around the world.

    If as you say “So, yes, if Cuba does not have a holiday celebrating the end of official slavery there, I am pushing hard for it now” then make sure to do the same for every-other-country on the planet to have an official end of slavery holiday. But most of all make sure to also include non African slaves in the holiday — or is your goal for African-American slaves only?

    However, before you start with your noble cause, may I suggest that you first start by eliminating existing slavery in those countries [1] that still practice slavery even to this day?

    For me, while our U.S.A citizens and residence, government and non government are taking the day off to celebrating Juneteenth day, I’m waiting to see when there will be an official Federal holiday celebrating Indigenous Peoples day. No, renaming Columbus day to Indigenous Peoples day won’t cut it.

    [1] https://www.inverse.com/article/31386-countries-with-the-most-slaves

    • @George A.
      I absolutely agree with you. Having grown up in a South American country where “slavery” existed before my very eyes, though not in name, I fully understand that the insidious practice of “owning” other human beings is alive and thriving in many parts of the world. A young, penniless, woman from an economically depressed urban area, who finds herself at the mercy of a wealthy family as a domestic servant, in exchange for often inhumane lodging, inadequate food and regular abuse of all types, is, for all intents and purposes, a slave. This is just one example of modern-day slavery. Why should that keep us from celebrating the legal termination of the enslavement of African Americans in the United States? Every person who can make any strides towards ending slavery of any kind anywhere should do so, of course. The new, socialist president of Colombia is sure to make a difference to those in near-slavery there. I am so happy for the citizens of Colombia right now. (Aside: lets just legalize and tax currently illicit drugs once and for all). And I will wholeheartedly celebrate Indigenous People’s Day should that come to pass. Kawsaypac! (Life/Cheers, in Quechua)

    • Jennifer Gittes Taplin, your high hopes for Colombian socialist have no basis in Latin American statistics. For example, socialist populist Venezuela has 5.58/1000 people in Estimated Proportion Living in Modern Slavery, high 57.89/100 Vulnerability to Modern Slavery and third lowed CC Government Response Rating to slavery incidents, worst stats in Latin America and significantly worse then in then capitalist Columbia and much worse then other countries with capitalist president (Brazil), Peronist president (Argentina) and nationalist president (Uruguay)

  7. A friend in San Diego said that these are “the High Holidays” because it is Pride Month and Juneteenth at the same time.

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