{"id":57590,"date":"2024-06-19T08:34:09","date_gmt":"2024-06-19T15:34:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=57590"},"modified":"2024-06-19T14:10:36","modified_gmt":"2024-06-19T21:10:36","slug":"juneteenth-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=57590","title":{"rendered":"Juneteenth 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Today is Juneteenth. We mark the day in 1865 when the last of enslaved Black Americans in Texas first learned of the Emancipation Proclamation \u2013 more than two years after it was issued.<\/em> It is a day that reminds us that change is not just desirable, but possible. That liberation is to be celebrated as a shift from a status quo – slavery – to a goal, however compromised in its evolution: freedom and equality for all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photographs today were taken 10 years ago when I still worked as a volunteer photographer with dance groups for teaching kids African dance, drumming and customs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seems like the perfect day to ask the question why so many powerful forces in this country, most densely represented in the current Supreme Court constellation of judges, want to revert from the change that we celebrate to a situation that enshrines the status quo at the very time when slavery was alive and well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I am, of course, talking about the embrace of Originalism<\/a><\/em>, the legal theory that judges should interpret the Constitution exclusively in ways the Founders meant it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let me count the ways in which this approach, heavily promoted by right wing forces across the judiciary, is problematic. For a more in depth discussion of the issues I strongly<\/em> recommend a new book by Madiba K. Dennie, The Originalism Trap<\/a><\/em>. The legal commentator, previously a counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice and professor at New York University School of Law, is now a deputy editor and senior contributor at the critical legal commentary outlet Balls and Strikes<\/a><\/em>, which I follow closely. Her new book reveals the many inherent faults of this supposed intellectual theory that treats civil rights gains as categorically suspect, eager to roll them back, reverting the country to the inequitable version of the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Here are the bullet points as expressed by her: <\/p>\n\n\n\n