ArcaMax

Juneteenth is done, but the horrors of Pride Month continue, and there's still no "White History Month."

And white folks like me still have to work, which is practically the same thing as slavery, except your boss can't sell your kids, at least not yet.

And there's no "Straight Pride" parade, and if there is, it's a comically dangerous collection of incels, nearly Nazis, ammo-sexuals and people who make normal straight people wonder if we picked the wrong side of the fence. Gay people produce Broadway musicals. Straight people produce Anthony Oliver. It's embarrassing, is what it is.

In Massachusetts, where I live in the remains of an abolitionist town, reactions to Juneteenth range from rubber stamp "Gimme the day off" to "The slaves were well treated, and the Civil War didn't have anything to do with slavery." If you're hugely in favor of the holiday, either you work for a college, you're Black or you work in Human Resources.

But Juneteenth is over, like the Holocaust is over, and won't those people ever quit whining and being victims? Why, when my ancestors came over from Ireland, they were called names for maybe 10 years until they got on the police department and elected their first city councilor. The first Black city councilor would come later, like maybe 100 years later or more.

But the Boston Celtics are champions again, and Boston has a parade when that happens, and the white people drive in from the suburbs, and maybe they drive past the house where Grandpa lived. Don't get out of the car. The neighborhood's changed.

For a lot of its history, Boston was as segregated as Itta Bena, Mississippi, but it was cute, kinda Leprechaun-ish segregation. No "colored only" signs. No lynchings. Just the back turned to the Black face.

But that's all done now because all past injustices are over, and quit whining. You don't hear Italian Americans whining, do ya?

American professional sports are pretty much the only real meritocracy in the country, and what did that get you?

It got you majority Black sports leagues, is what it got you. Head-to-head with white men, in fair competition, Blacks won over and over and over. We're having some success bringing in white players from other countries, but in general, professional sports is white people drinking beer and Black people playing the sport. White people are carving out their own space, though. The more Black faces on the team, the fancier the food is for the white spectators. Tailgating used to mean a quart of beer and a Slim Jim. Now, you got white guys in the parking lot rolling sushi.

The reason white people don't complain about the majority Black sports teams in their towns is because, if you assembled an all-white team, it would lose. All the time. By a lot of points. Over and over. No more parades, not unless the fans had one hell of a sense of humor, which they do, although seldom over a period of decades.

There remains hockey, which doesn't count because players wear so many clothes and so much protective headgear that their color isn't obvious. Plus, no sober person has ever watched a hockey game, so the fans can't focus on color, or much of anything else.

Juneteenth is a very big deal. For a long time in this country, you could buy, sell, whip, murder, rape and mutilate Black people. "White people did that," we say proudly of the Civil War. "White people died to free Black slaves."

Yup. The white people on the other side didn't, the Confederate ones, but that's in the past. We're supposed to remember 9/11 forever and forget slavery as quickly as possible.

And when the championship parade rolls through Boston or any other city, do the decent thing and get drunk. Don't think about white supremacy bouncing away like a big rubber ball.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.