How Blackness Can Transcend Thanksgiving’s Roots

Over the past year,  America has added to the history books more bloody and painful examples of a core national truth. You can build anything on a lie. With a lie you can invade, pillage, and traffic in the terror nations around the world. This is not unfamiliar terrain for Black Americans obviously, in the name of lies we as Black people  have been dehumanized in ways inconceivable to most outside of those insulted by the “holiday” we are about to celebrate. 

Enter Thanksgiving, a day that lays at the heart of the American mythos, a day packaged and sold on every false notion that has been perpetuated about this nation. The pretend humanism and good will dealing used to obfuscate the genocide of the indigenous peoples of this land. With that understanding in mind, what is it that we as Black Americans come together to celebrate every Fourth Thursday of November? 

 We must first examine what it means that the country builds on lies.  Each minority group is sold a lie. That lie is unique to each oppressed group, however  usually it revolves around the concept of the “American Dream.”  Through the virtue of being in this nation for nearly the entirety of its existence, Black people in particular have collected quite a few lies from the lips of the U.S. and its founders.  The biggest part of this lie (as it relates to Thanksgiving) is that our participation in said American Dream will bring us a version of family that is acceptable. 

The truth is, something has always existed outside of the neat definition of family that America has provided and that something is Blackness. Due to the numerous harsh realities of what the U.S. has done to us, the way our families are constructed is entirely different from what has been laid before us.  Our lived experience does not allow us the delusion to think that we have to have family in the way America defines it and that shows in the ways we choose to celebrate family as well. 

The way we imagine our families or communities can be different from the mostly mythological views that we have seen about the American nuclear family. While it might seem myopic I believe our interpretation of Thanksgiving gives us a true chance to imagine family and community structures that exist outside of patriarchal and colonial concepts. When you sit with your family this Thanksgiving, think about the external pressure on every person you see. From your grandmother who needs no explanation of the horrors this country can inflict on us to younger cousins who are becoming all too aware of what role this system requires of them to maintain itself. Think about who each of these people would be without those constraints, and then take a deep breath and begin to think about how to make this thought a permanent reality. 

If we can define this “holiday” outside of the scope of colonial thinking, then we can also imagine ourselves the same way. Any and all appeals to respectability politics  would come across as nonsense if there is no white supremacist standard to hold ourselves against. If Blackness by definition is what exists outside of the constraints of whiteness then we could embrace the more feminine and queer aspects of our history that have been suppressed in order to satisfy standards that were never meant for our good. We have the ability to conceive of community in ways that stand contrary to the harmful stereotypes that have unfairly been attributed to us. 

If we define what Black manhood actually is outside of “I am 6 ‘4 and make 6 figures therefore I am high value” or if we allow Black women the right to be something other than strong ALL of the time we would be able to have more authenticity in our presentations of Blackness.  This I believe is the most important part of our celebration, a small glimpse at what it could mean for us to decolonize our conception of self and of the Black family. 

This also extends to Black people who for one reason or another are unable to be with or unwelcomed by their families. Whether it be incarceration, queerphobia, or any number of problems. These people who can at times become afterthoughts would be better understood in what they have also added to Blackness as we know it and play a role in defining it in the future. 

Understand this is not an argument for the joy of thanksgiving  being revolutionary or anything like that, however, I do believe it that what Black Americans have done with this holiday provides an opportunity for true and eye opening empathy. It’s when we begin to see our own families this way, more thoughts on solidarity begin to form. We can start to again see ourselves as a part of a larger global community of oppressed people while also understanding our role in others’ oppression. When we see entire families being wiped out in Palestine or the unimaginable level of suffering in Sudan, we can understand it as a tragedy because of the loss of life but also because of the loss of the culture and memories that those families held on to. The contradictions of this country exist in our own history that is a fact passed from generation to generation and having days like Thanksgiving that allows us to reflect on these realities even in subtle ways is incredibly important.  

As I said none of this is achieved merely in thought, the work required to bring this into reality is extensive and relies on us making the active choice to build in our own community. But this thought should be a cause for hope in one of the most uncertain political periods we have faced in quite some time.  Within our celebration we can  take the time to be thankful for what we have, while knowing that what we could have does not have to be just a fantasy. 

In every example you can think of, the clandestine and outright terroristic actions taken by the U.S based on lies also leads you to just as many examples of people especially Black people defining ourselves and taking action against systems of oppression and oppressive thought. 

America, in the entirety of its being, will not be able to contain all that Blackness can and will be. Again, do not mistake this for me saying that the revolution will come over mac and cheese and watching my Cowboys get beat on Thanksgiving,  but I am saying the first step of community and class consciousness is communication. We have something precious in our celebration that exists outside the bounds of a” holiday” marred in genocide,  we have the truth.