White Juneteenth Scholarship Recipients Draw Outrage
As Juneteenth has become a national holiday, there have been moments that illustrate potential pitfalls of the holiday’s wider exposure; one such moment occurred on June 24 when images of a peculiar Juneteenth Sponsorship Luncheon & Scholarship Awards circulated on social media.
Tyllah-Chanel Cornelio, an author, educator, and marketing strategist, shared an image showing the recipients of the scholarships. Despite Juneteenth being in the name, only one of the recipients was Black. Naturally, this prompted outrage and concern, as well as some jokes.
Cornelio followed up her initial posts about the awards ceremony with a few updates. In one, she said that there were allegedly multiple donors to the scholarships, and the picture she shared was only from one group. This, however, was not a satisfactory explanation, as she went on to express that Black people should not be sharing the spotlight with white students in a scholarship named in honor of Juneteenth.
“Now they are saying there were multiple donors, and these are the winners’ results from one donor. That’s not clarified in this post, and I still disagree with anyone not BLACK winning JUNETEENTH scholarship funds! If enough Black students didn’t apply, group the funds together to give them to the Black students who did! Them students need as much as they can get! It’s unacceptable to award Juneteenth scholarship funds to anyone who is not BLACK, period.” Cornelio wrote.
The personal injury attorney who sponsored the scholarships, J. Chad Parker, wrote in a post on Facebook that he only provided the funds for the scholarships and had no input on who was selected to receive the awards. “I give to many causes. I never ask to control where it goes. I did that this year. People seem to think I did something other than donate. I’m not on the Juneteenth Committee and don’t know anyone getting them. I only thought I should support the cause. I was asked to get a float last year, and I did. Not my idea. I’m sorry people are disappointed. I am, too.” Parker wrote.
A post depicting the scholarship winners from someone who claims to be one of the Tyler, TX lawyer’s employees, Bernard Ross, appears to have been deleted from Facebook, but the screenshots have already circulated and generated outrage on other social media sites, like Twitter/X. Others have taken the episode as a reason to explain how they believe that the federal government making Juneteenth a holiday did not accomplish what Black people were asking for in 2021 when Juneteenth was made a holiday.
In 2020, Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee introduced a resolution to recognize Juneteenth’s historical significance, and she told Time Magazine that Juneteenth’s unique status as a call to action and a marker of progress made the time right to declare it a national holiday. “There needs to be a reckoning, an effort to unify. One thing about national holidays is they help educate people about what the story is,” Jackson Lee said.
“Juneteenth legislation is a call for freedom, but it also reinforces the history of African Americans. We’ve fought for this country. We’ve made great strides, but we’re still the victims of sharp disparities. Our neighborhoods reflect that. We’ve been denied the same opportunities for housing and access to healthcare, and in 2020, [during] COVID-19, all of the glaring disparities are shown. Because of that, I think this is a time that we may find people who are desirous of understanding the history not necessarily only of African Americans, but the history of America.”
However, as Theodore Johnson explained in a 2022 op-ed for The Bulwark, he believes that making Juneteenth a holiday was the easy thing to do, and the thing that Juneteenth commemorates represented the federal government doing something difficult.
“Sometimes symbolic legislation, such as the recently passed antilynching law, is worth doing because of the signal it sends to the public about acceptable norms and which narratives hold value in the American story. And, of course, pragmatism doesn’t require purity or convicted hearts to recognize the value of a good legislative action. But the politics of Juneteenth’s ascendance to a national holiday is actually a story about a democratic system that is presently incapable of doing hard things and choosing instead to take the easiest path available. And that’s a shame. Because Juneteenth should commemorate an America that does the hardest of things.” Johnson wrote.
Although Juneteenth is now a national holiday and the story of what Juneteenth means to Black people is now spread far and wide, that unfortunately does not cancel out the audacity of whiteness.
Their desire for Columbus celebrations and initiatives that should, in keeping with the spirit of Juneteenth, rightfully solely belong to Black people appears to have gone nowhere, marked very clearly by a Juneteenth scholarship program that went to mostly white recipients.