Beyond Big Turkeys and Small Talk
Dr. Maulana Karenga
The histories and holidays of the oppressed, colonized and enslaved
are, of necessity, different from the history and holidays of the
oppressor, the colonizer and the enslaver. Likewise, their
interpretations of those histories and holidays also differ, for they
are lived and learned from different standpoints. Thus, the Palestinians
call the conquest and colonization of Palestine, the Nakba—the Great
Catastrophe, and the Israelis call it the war of independence. The
Native Americans call the conquest and colonization of their land and
the decimation of their people genocide and holocaust. The Europeans
call it “discovery,” “the move westward,” “reaching the promised land,”
and other self-sanitizing words and phrases.
During the Holocaust of enslavement, Frederick Douglass, asked to
speak on the meaning of the 4th of July, seen as Independence Day for
Whites, told his White audience, “This Fourth of July is yours not mine.
You may rejoice. I must mourn.” For it is for the enslaved African “a
day which reveals to him more than any other day of the year the gross
injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim.” Indeed, he goes
on to say that for the enslaved African, “Your celebration is a sham,”
and a repulsive mixture of vanity, heartlessness, mockery and hypocrisy.
And “your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings with all
your religious parade and solemnity are, to him, mere bombast,
fraud,
deception, impiety and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which
would disgrace a nation of savages.” And finally, descendants of the
Wampanaog in Massachusetts who first welcomed their White visitors and
invaders, call what Whites call “Thanksgiving Day” the “Day of
Mourning,” mourning for the millions killed and the memories erased and
falsified about this great Holocaust.
We live in a country and world of brutal realities and comforting
illusions, carefully crafted to mask and diminish the truth and tragedy
of these realities. Certainly, one of the most comforting illusions we
have in this country is the origins and meaning of the holiday of
Thanksgiving with its big turkeys, small talk and scream-filled
televised football games. Through both official and personal pretension,
we approach Thanksgiving without its history of horrors and the
uncomfortable calling to mind that more than turkeys were killed for the
celebration of that first day and that its roots lie in the victory
celebrations of European genocidal wars against the Native Americans.
So, as we sit down in celebration of the sanitized version of
Thanksgiving, let us, as African people, honor our ethical obligation
found in the Husia to “not turn a blind eye to injustice or a deaf ear
to truth.” Instead, let us remember the lives, cultures and whole
peoples lost, and honor and share in the Native American Day of Mourning
as they did our mourning and quest for freedom when we first met,
joined and struggled with them against our common oppression and
oppressor.
Indeed, over the centuries our histories and lives intersected and
intertwined in various ways: in liberation struggles; in nation-building
such as the Seminole nation; in shared asylum, establishing defense
communities in Mexico against “Yankee” encroachment; shared lineage and
communal living throughout the Americas; and in our common quest to
defend our dignity, reaffirm our rights and make our own unique
contribution to a new history of humankind. The need, then, as Malcolm
reminds us, is to think in ways that liberate rather than limit us and
free us from false and deficient ways of viewing and engaging the
world. Thus, if we rethink the practice of thanksgiving and separate it
from the official celebration, we see that giving thanks is not a
problem, but celebrating genocide and/or oppression and the triumph of
evil clearly is. Surely, it is an evil irony that the pilgrims who held
the first White thanksgiving celebration in this country, did so to
celebrate victory over those who welcomed and saved them; those who gave
them food and shelter, those who taught them how to grow crops and
offered them peaceful co-existence in their own land.
Moreover, it is worth noting that these people who came here running
away from religious intolerance and persecution in their own country
established a similar, if not more severe religious tyranny. They
self-righteously saw themselves as puritans, pure and chosen by God, and
in God’s name, they condemned and burned their women as witches with
repulsive regularity, brutally suppressed all dissent and created a
White god and White religion in their own image and interest. It is
with this false interpretation and inspiration from their racialized god
that they went about they’re devilish work of genocide, justifying it
with biblical injunctions like, “slay the heathen hip and thigh, and
make them hewers of wood and drawers of water.” This racist ranting,
posing as religion, was used also for Africans and other peoples of
color.
Advancing conquest, occupation and imperial savagery as salvation or
self-defense, they posed their plunder as the will and promise of God.
Like their modern-day descendants, they turned god into a chooser of an
elect and superior people, a ruthless real estate agent promising other
peoples’ land and resources, and an ally in the genocidal wars they
waged to seize them. And they now, as then, pretend shock and outrage
when the oppressed people rightfully and righteously rise up in
resistance.
We might reason that celebrating the European thanksgiving day is
all right because we’re giving thanks to God not to the oppressor;
reaffirming bonds between us; and it’s convenient. Surely, it is always
good to gather together to reaffirm the bonds between us. But do we have
to do it on this day? And do we have to eat turkey, make small talk and
act as if the official sanitized version of thanksgiving is real and
the Native Americans are not our brothers and sisters in life and
struggle and their Holocaust, like our own, merits no place in our
memory, hearts and homes?
Thanksgiving is a good and life-affirming practice and we should
always practice it. But let us give thanks in our own way and on our own
day and throughout the year. Let us give thanks for the good in and of
the world, the good of life and love, of sisterhood, brotherhood,
friendship, family and community, and the awesome beauty and good of the
world. And let us turn our prayers of thanksgiving into the practice of
good, especially for the poor and vulnerable among us. And in this way,
we honor the best of our moral heritage and open the way through
struggle to a new history and a new world. Reprint.
Dr. Maulana Karenga, Professor and Chair of Africana Studies,
California State University-Long Beach; Executive Director, African
American Cultural Center (Us); Creator of Kwanzaa; and author of
Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community and Culture and Introduction
to Black Studies, 4th Edition, www.OfficialKwanzaaWebsite.org;
www.MaulanaKarenga.org.
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