On Thanksgiving and flawed culture

Every November, articles highlighting the oppressive history of Thanksgiving make the rounds on social media, shared by folks looking to challenge the myths surrounding the Pilgrims and their famous feast. The problems with Thanksgiving are well-documented and legitimate. The story taught in most schools and told broadly in American culture is romanticized and generally false. The holiday ignores Native American genocide by the European colonists, perpetuating the current oppression of indigenous peoples.

While the problems with Thanksgiving are clear, the solutions are not. Some have suggested that we abolish the holiday all together. This holds much appeal, as it would send a strong message against America’s history of racism and recognize the complicity in American traditions. The implications, however, would extend beyond the single holiday.

The problems surrounding Thanksgiving can apply to numerous aspects of normative American culture. Many of our traditions are rife with heteronormativism, the assumption of straightness and of strict male and female genders. Many of our favorite movies and TV shows contain problematic language or themes, like gender or racial stereotypes. Much of our history centers around oppression of non-normative people, and our teaching of history often ignores this fact.

The solution to these problems goes deeper than abolishing each one individually. Normative American culture, including straight culture, white culture, and the gender binary rests on oppressive foundations. The very conceptions of whiteness, and straightness, and the gender binary, were constructed to create distance and supposed superiority between groups. Regardless of the extent to which beneficiaries of privilege interrogate their identities, however, they can’t change the fact that they are white, straight, cisgender, or any other normative identity. How is it possible to exist within this culture, with this identity, without perpetuating the oppressive traditions upon which normative American culture is founded?

Asking all privileged folks to completely disown their roots is unpractical, and in some circumstances unreasonable. Someone who has celebrated Thanksgiving all their life won’t stop eating turkey and giving thanks because they suddenly understand the history of American oppression. Our solution must challenge normative folks while also recognizing their lived experience and not invalidating their roots.

Fixing problems in normative culture involves challenging the history and underlying ideals of everything we consume and perform. We don’t have to abolish every single element of white culture, or male culture, or straight culture, but we must deeply interrogate and challenge their foundations. Sometimes we might need to change them so much that they seem to be completely transformed. Some ideals, like confederate monuments and confederate flags, just need to go. Heteronormativism has no place in any tradition, and some movies are just too problematic to be supported.

Some traditions, however, can be salvaged, as long as people use them to challenge themselves rather than to romanticize their history. Some things are simply too embedded in our culture, or have positive effects that are too important, to completely remove them. Thanksgiving has a very positive effect of bringing families together to recognize what they are thankful for.  Few movies or other entertainment media are perfectly progressive, yet prescribing a boycott of the entire industry isn’t really feasible for most people. Christianity holds a very problematic history, yet asking Christians to abandon their faith makes no sense. 

Assessing traditionally oppressive cultures requires nuance–clearly some elements must go, but expecting every normative American to completely abandon their roots will only serve to make them feel attacked. We must change traditions to recognize their problematic past, allowing people to maintain their cultural identity while minimizing complicity in modern-day oppression. We must adopt a balanced approach that brings normative folks into the fold, challenging the oppression within normative culture while also validating the lived human experience of all people.

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