By Chauncey Devega for Salon. Like most national holidays, Thanksgiving is a myth. It does the powerful political work of encouraging American Exceptionalism: a belief that the United States was preordained by “God” for a special place among all others; and that it is a “shining city on the hill.”
In reality, the arrival of the Mayflower (and other European explorers and colonists in the “New World”) would help to set into motion two of the greatest crimes in human history: the genocide of First Nations peoples and the enslavement and mass murder of black Americans. Stolen land and stolen labor are the twin bedrocks of American empire. Their influence was (and remains) so profoundly deep that it would take a civil war (what was really a second American Revolution) and then 100 years of additional struggle to strike down white supremacy as the formal public policy of the United States.
First Nations peoples can never be made whole for the land (and lives) that was stolen from them. On Thanksgiving, the American people should, instead of being thankful for what they have–and by doing so playing along with a tired mythology of American genocide and slavery–should inaugurate a day of political activism and resistance.
Instead of gorging on unhealthy food and watching football, it would be a truly meaningful Thanksgiving holiday if people stopped being thankful, got really angry, confronted power, and then fought and struggled to remedy the injustices in American society.
