This is evidently a long time coming, and while it may be true that this is a gesture whereas we have many other pressing priorities (voting rights chief among them), it's still a sensible thing to do. And I'm genuinely shocked to see it passed the Senate unanimously, when virtually nothing related to race (or particularly reckoning with America's legacy of slavery) ever gets unanimous support in Congress.
I'm already seeing boneheaded arguments against it online, such as it creating "too many" federal holidays between May and July when we already have Memorial Day and Independence Day. First of all, there are no federal holidays in June currently, and it's not like we can just arbitrarily change the date when the last enslaved people in Confederate states were finally set free in Texas in 1865.
(Side note: this does get more complicated with further examination, as enslaved people in some border Union states were actually not emancipated until December of that same year, with the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Also, slavery literally exists to this day in our prison systems—affecting Black people far more than any other group—where it is no less an immoral stain on this country's legacy and must be stopped. That said, making Juneteenth a holiday takes us an important step closer to keeping these things a vital part of the national conversation.)
