Many conservatives are ambivalent, at best, regarding today’s holiday, which is understandable. It was enacted by Congress and signed into law by President Biden in the wake of the rioting and race-hysteria that followed George Floyd’s death. It was of a piece with the kneeling, the black squares, the toppling of statues, and all the other stupid and wicked manifestations of the Great Awokening.

That’s unfortunate, because Juneteenth is a truly American holiday. I’ve been writing on these pages for 20 years that we should replace Martin Luther King Day with Juneteenth. It is important that we have a national holiday celebrating the full incorporation of our black compatriots into the American body politic. The problem with MLK Day is not that King was a flawed man — we all are (including, y’know, Cesar Chavez). But King was the right man for the moment to be the chief voice of black discontent, rather than America-hating villains like the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, or the Black Panthers.

But we shouldn’t have a national holiday for any individual not named Washington, Lincoln, or Jesus Christ. (Columbus Day was sort of the MLK Day of a century ago, pointing to the full incorporation of Italian Americans — which has been accomplished, and at this point I could live with its retirement.)

In contrast to MLK Day, Juneteenth has spread organically, from the bottom up. It marks the June 19, 1865, arrival of Union forces in Galveston Bay, Texas, with the news that the war and slavery were over. The newly freed slaves in Texas celebrated Emancipation Day or Jubilee Day on the occasion’s first anniversary, and it spread organically over the decades, with local parades and readings of the Emancipation Proclamation. It continued to spread under the radar — a Google Books Ngram search shows no trace of the word until the late 1970s, just before Texas made it an official state holiday in 1979.

And anyway, who really wants a day off so soon after the Christmas season, in the middle of frigid January? Juneteenth’s proximity to the Fourth of July is also a selling point, allowing for what amounts to a Freedom and Independence Season, kind of like the extended celebration of Christmas.

Juneteenth’s introduction to the nation at large as a BLM, DEI, race-hustling holiday doesn’t have to be the end of the story. Have you ever read the later verses of “This Land Is Your Land”? They’re communist hokum, which is unsurprising, considering Woody Guthrie was a Stalin-loving Bolshevik who actually wrote a song praising the Nazi-Soviet alliance and the invasion of Poland. But its first several verses are beautiful and it has become a patriotic standard — alongside Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” to which Guthrie intended his song to be a sort of rebuke. (That the Jewish immigrant wrote the rousing patriotic song, while the Oklahoman was an open enemy of America suggests there’s more nuance to the question of American identity than some pushing the “heritage American” narrative acknowledge.)

In any case, rather than decrying the deplorable circumstances of Juneteenth’s birth as a national holiday, let’s embrace it and “patriotize” it. Happy Juneteenth!