Miss Juneteenth, the stunning SXSW award-winning debut of writer-director Channing Godfrey Peoples that's out now. But the pageant culture that is the focus of her movie gives Black girls a hint of the American dream—a shiny spectacle, prohibitively expensive to enter, and life-changing for just a few winners, the Miss Juneteenth pageant offers a patina of respectability at a high cost.
It’s not exactly fair, and the characters in the movie would never expect anything to be.Why should they? is a holiday that commemorates June 19, 1865, when enslaved African Americans in Texas learned that the Civil War was over and they were free—two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation had gone into effect. “It’s said there was celebration.