In class and online, I have learned a lot from listening to/reading what my classmates have to say about Thanksgiving (i.e. Miranda's post). Like many others, my education on the full impacts of colonialism was inadequate until later in my life (Although how can education ever be entirely adequate? Since there is always more to learn, it seems hard to tell when a school has done a good job impressing on its students either the truth or the tragedy of episodes like the trans-Atlantic slave, the Holocaust, or the genocide of Native Americans). Obviously, the mythos surrounding Thanksgiving is a fertile place to look for the ways European exploration of the Americas has been romanticized, but in this blog I want to look a little past the subject matter in question.
Few moments in the American cultural tradition evoke the self and the other like Thanksgiving. One's entire family is (for better or worse) supposed to gather around the same table. The family is an important unit of identity in American society, and Thanksgiving provides us the opportunity to see the entirety of this aspect of our identity in one place. At the same time, where the self is reinforced the other may be as well, and Thanksgiving can often be the place where "the weird uncle" feels it is appropriate to voice a repugnant, prejudiced ideology. Moreover, some radical right-wing ideas in today's political landscape, like the threat of a White Genocide or the degeneracy of legally accepting gay marriage or gay customers, are based around a presumed "White family unit," in some form or another. In a broader sense, the imagery of a Thanksgiving dinner is one of the most foundational tools used to construct the idea of the White family unit, losing out only to a July 4th BBQ and Christmas dinner. This image of a supposedly ideal family is often used on outlets like Fox News as an unattainable example that minority groups can never reach, which is then in turn used to explain why minorities can't achieve the same level of success as White Americans. I remember Bill O'Reilly's favorite method was always to point out that "Blacks," his term, had children out of wedlock too often, and he would go on to explain why a single parent household is inferior to a dual parent one. Ultimately, he was comparing the White American family Self to the Black American family Other. This observation brings us back to Todorov, particularly a point that stuck with me about the way Columbus viewed the Tainos and other natives as part of nature. I bring up this point because I believe we still conceptualize the arenas of child-rearing and familial structure as a concerns of nature. How often does someone objecting to gay marriage call it "unnatural," or someone claiming single parenting is inferior mention the "biological" difficulty of the task. Hence, I recognize a bit of what Todorov described in Columbus' understanding of the Other in people today, where they are denied humanity in favor of being considered parts of nature.
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AuthorAmerican University Class of 2021. Interested in state-building and economic governance. Archives
December 2018
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