Sue Lani Madsen: What’s your narrative?

How many of my fellow Pacific Northwesterners had heard of Juneteenth before last summer? It’s been a Texas state holiday for over 40 years, since the underlying June 19 event took place there. It’s understandably a new thing if you’ve never lived in Texas or lack family history of celebrating Juneteenth.

And it’s worth a key date marking America’s progress toward living up to the promise of “all men are created equal.” It enriches the historical narrative of liberty and justice for all. There is power in telling positive stories, and Juneteenth is an opportunity for all Americans to celebrate.

But will it be a celebration of hope or trauma? Can we build a shared narrative or will this be yet another point of polarization? That’s the challenge of Juneteenth.

If you have worked in child welfare, education or health care then you’ve learned the acronym ACEs – for adverse childhood experiences. Someone with a high ACEs score, meaning many traumatic experiences, is statistically likely to suffer a lifetime of negative physical and mental health impacts. Children who are continually told they are damaged, disadvantaged or unwanted will believe it. The antidote is PCEs – positive childhood experiences – and connections with affirming adults who push and pull them toward good choices. Children need positive narratives of hope to flourish.

So does a country. And the left-leaning mainstream media narrative this past week has uncritically repeated the big lie that objecting to critical race theory means stifling history teachers from discussing the uncomfortable trauma of chattel slavery in North America.

What parents and conservatives pushing back against CRT-based curriculum object to is the negative narrative of America as an irredeemably racist country founded to promote and protect chattel slavery, intended to keep Black people down in perpetuity.

It’s unhealthy to feed children negative narratives, and to lie by omitting the positive. Such a vision offers no hope with its narrow lens of oppressor and oppressed.

The “1619 Project” is the prime example of perpetuating negative narratives. The advocacy group the National Association of Scholars called on the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind the Pulitzer awarded to the author. After the New York Times declined to address the concerns of a dozen respected historians over both accuracy and interpretation, they published their correspondence in the History News Network, a publication of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of George Washington University:

“We are also troubled that these materials are now to become the basis of school curriculums, with the imprimatur of the New York Times. The remedy for past historical oversights is not their replacement by modern oversights. We therefore respectfully ask the New York Times to withhold any steps to publish and distribute The 1619 Project until these concerns can be addressed in a thorough and open fashion.”

This curriculum is currently in use in 4,500 school districts across the country, but none of the 15 largest districts in Washington, according to a survey by the Washington Policy Center. It’s hard to say whether we’ve been more selective or just lucky.

Juneteenth is a national opportunity to correct past oversights and teach history holistically – the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful. The ugliness of slavery in Africa and the Americas, and how deeply slavery has been woven into the fabric of cultures across continents and centuries. The beautifully aspirational words of the Declaration of Independence, giving a toehold for the revolutionary abolitionist movement. The good works of the 19th-century abolitionists and 20th-century leaders of the multiracial civil rights movement, and the bad actors pushing against both.

It is a story still in progress. Ryan Bomberger, a pro-life activist and author of “Not Equal: Civil Rights Gone Wrong,” recently wrote in support of Juneteenth as an all-American holiday: “I only wish that the alternative names used for Juneteenth would’ve become the official name, like Juneteenth Emancipation Day or Juneteenth Freedom Day. … Those names evoke the truer essence of this historical moment.”

There are some who will see Juneteenth as a day to reflect on past sins, and confession is indeed good for the soul. But hope must be part of the narrative as well, lest we leave the country wallowing in spiritual depression.

In the polarized debate over whether the focus of Juneteenth should be repentance or redemption, common ground exists where conservative cynicism aligns with progressive fear. Have we merely created another paid holiday for the privileged, a three-day weekend to party and the source of intraoffice power struggles over who gets to schedule their vacation for June 20 to July 3? And will we remember the meaning of the 19th of June in the next generation better than many remember the meaning of the 4th of July today? I hope so.

Contact Sue Lani Madsen at rulingpen@gmail.com.