A point that's not made often enough in response to white or straight people going "where's our holiday" is that Juneteenth and Pride commemorate endings and turning points in struggles that never should have happened.

"We finally stopped getting sold as chattel." "We finally started fighting back and insisting on our rights."

The amount of bittersweet in this is difficult to contemplate if you've not experienced it.

Even Martin Luther King Day fundamentally exists because he was assassinated.

Celebrations for marginalized populations are inexorably tied to our oppression. The emotional tenor of them—their mixture of joy and mourning and pain and hope—are not something that a dominant culture knows.

The only thing in my lived experience as a white person that gives me any sort of perspective on what is being felt and remembered by Juneteenth is being trans and looking at Stonewall and thinking about the shame and rage that went into that turning point.

And even then, frankly, knowing that slavery was worse than anything the queer community has experienced.

If your cultural background lacks a shared trauma that defines your community then you don't really have a reference point for what these celebrations are.