Jennifer Rubin, Decolonizing the Calendar: The Struggle to Cancel Problematic “H***days”. Simon & Schuster, 2037, xx+184 pp., $99.95
This short, inexpensive paperback fills an essential gap in recent social history by chronicling the campaign to end the practice of labeling days of officially authorized respite from work with names that have racist, imperialist, cisgenderist or other unacceptable denotations and connotations. Mx. Rubin, the doyenne of conservative columnists, brings to this task the sensitivity and charm for which they is famous. As an example of their care not to offend, they excises “holi” from the archaic term for non-working days, aware of its triggering effects on LBGTQIXZR++ readers.
The transition to the current rational, non-offensive system, in which the third Monday of each month is recognized as an Official Paid Leave Day, wasn’t easy. Vested interests founded on pro-oppressor narratives fought fiercely to retain the white privilege of celebrating events like the pro-slavery insurrection of 1776, the onset of the Pilgrim invaders’ devastation of the natural order so long curated by the First Nations, and, worst of all, the mythical birth of “Christ”, whose cult persecuted feminist and indigenous faith practices until its recent suppression.
As people of all genders became woke to the systems of patriarchy in which they were enmeshed, the cancellation of such designations as “Independence Day”, “Thanksgiving” and “Christmas”, not to mention the more horrific “Veterans’ Day”, a festival of militarism, became inevitable. The sterner fights involved day monikers that slipped poison into body politic surreptitiously.
Mx. Rubin highlights three battles.
In an effort to preserve a vestige of “Columbus Day”, named after a genocidal killer lauded by far right Italian Catholics, the pseudo-woke “Indigenous Peoples Day” was substituted. That fooled no one for very long. The date still corresponded to Columbus’s brutal incursion, the first of the conquistador assaults that wiped out the peaceful First Nations. Naming the day after its victims aggravated the genocide.
“Juneteenth” ostensibly honored the purported abolition of Black slavery (which of course persisted under the thin cloak of capitalism). In reality, it honored a classic “white savior” narrative, deliberately ignoring the goal of both sides of the civil war between white power structures, namely, to perpetuate and solidify white supremacy.
The final and most striking instance, to which Mx. Rubin devotes her longest chapter, concerns “Martin Luther King, Jr. Day”.
Established during the white supremacist, heteronormative presidency of Ronald Reagan, the day’s eponym was a Republican agitator who insisted on the racist dogma that the content of a person’s character is more important than the color of their skin. He also was a sexual harasser whom the FBI, in one of its earliest #metoo projects, attempted to restrain. For many years, he served as the icon of racism, a black tongue uttering white ideas. When that façade finally collapsed, the anti-anti-racism forces retained enough clout to frustrate what they characterized as “the erasure of civil rights pioneer”.
Arguing with the racists accomplished nothing. For a long while, it appeared that “King Day” would endure, the lone remnant of calendrical backwardness.
Happily, the scholarship of Professor Nikole Hannah-Jones, the country’s most honored historian, came to the rescue. Professor Hannah-Jones foregrounded the ambiguity of “King Day”. “King” might refer to an individual with the surname “King”, but the reference could instead be to the title of a monarch.
“The professor cleverly seized on the latter meaning,” Mx. Rubin writes. “Until 1783 America had a King, and as Professor Hannah-Jones has demonstrated, the colonists’ revolt was motivated by the fear that King George III would outlaw slavery. Properly reinterpreted, then, ‘King Day’ rebuked the so-called ‘Founders’ and their spurious ‘Declaration of Independence’ and ‘Constitution’.”
That stroke of genius transformed the day into one that fully accords with the ideals of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Hence, it stands proud and peerless in the calendar.
Despite that victory, the struggle is unending. Mx. Rubin concludes on a somber note:
The more we probe the corrupt foundations of white “civilization”, the more we realize the urgency of purging all of its traces from humanity. The next battleground must be the very idea of imprisoning the passage of time, which the original peoples saw as a flowing, undivided whole. The numbering of “days”, indeed the very notion that “day” is anything more than a social construct, must be eradicated., along with the imperialist “numbers” assigned to them. Only when each increment of time is able to create its own identity will white supremacy be overthrown.
Inspiring words. Let us move forward, unanimous in our diversity, toward the glorious coming of Year Zero!
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