For the past month, I’ve been watching a spider construct a web on our front porch.

Maybe I have too much time on my hands because previously my only interest in spiders and their webs was to destroy them. Anyone who has walked into a web unknowingly can recall the discomfort of realizing that if the spider’s web is attached to you, the spider might be as well and might bite out of retaliation. So eliminating the web when you see one prevents that scenario.

This time, for whatever reason, I didn’t feel that urge. When I first noticed the web, it consisted of only a few strands stretching from an overhead beam to a hanging planter and down to the porch rail, probably about a 3-foot by 5-foot space.

There was nothing impressive about it. The spider, a little yellow dot about the size of a grain of rice, was so small you couldn’t see her legs. I watched as she spun her crude little strands of web. Each day, though, the web became more elaborate until, after a few weeks, it was a beautiful thing to see: A distinct, almost geometric pattern, a painstaking mosaic of fine, delicate lines and angles. The spider grew along with her creation, now plump, her once indistinguishable legs stretched out over the heart of her web as she patiently waited for the meal it was designed to provide her.

Watching the spider (I call her Betsy, after Betsy Ross) inspired an appreciation for spiders. A spider building a web is simultaneously an architect, a structural engineer, a master craftsman and a skilled hunter. If those qualities existed in a person, we would hail him as a renaissance man. We would appreciate his work.

I have come to think of Juneteenth much as I’ve come to think of the spider’s web.

Monday was Juneteenth, which became a federal holiday in 2021 but has been celebrated in the Black community since June 19, 1865, the day Black residents of Galveston, Texas, were informed of the end of the Civil War and their immediate emancipation, a freedom no doubt enforced by the federal troops that accompanied the message.

It is celebrated by many as Black Independence Day, since July 4 held hardly any significance for Black people, as Frederick Douglass caustically observed when speaking at an Independence Day celebration in Rochester, New York, in 1852.

For a long time, I was ambivalent about Juneteenth, the way you might be about a stranger’s birthday or wedding anniversary. What was it to me?

The George Floyd murder made me stop and think about a lot of things. One thing that came from that reflection was a new perspective of Juneteenth, although I’m not really sure how or to what extent I, as a white person, should celebrate it. At some level, it feels a bit like cultural appropriation. On another, as a descendant of a slave owner and a Confederate soldier who died fighting in the cause to prevent emancipation, it feels dishonest.

Then there are white people – far too many, sadly – who are entirely indifferent to the holiday and will acknowledge no role their own ancestors may have played in its history.

You hear this often. “There are no slave-owners or slaves in America today, so why should I feel guilty or ashamed?” or “Slaves were fed, clothed and sheltered so it wasn’t so bad,” or “Only a small percentage of white people were slave owners.” And finally, “Black people were slave-owners, too.”

A thoughtful person would neither make these arguments nor engage them because each of them convey a lack of empathy and understanding that defies logic and history.

Any such continuing effort to mitigate, minimize or revise white America’s treatment of its Black citizens assures that racism will continue to exist, evolve, even flourish. When we do that, we have forgotten what it should mean to be an American.

The best thing about America is not its perfection. America’s strength is the ability of a flawed people to see an injustice and correct it rather than rationalize it.

How do we get to that point, though?

Maybe it is like taking a careful look at a spider web. Once you see the web from the spider’s point of view, it’s not some scary thing we are threatened by, but a beautiful thing to be respected and appreciated.

That’s how I’ve come to think of Juneteenth.

I hope that’s the way you think of it, too.

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

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