Thinking Thanksgiving, part 2: What to the Wampanoag is the Fourth Thursday in November?

Yesterday I introduced the idea of bracketing as a way of accounting for my enjoyment of things that might otherwise be objectionable, like the film '300.' My hope was that this idea could then serve as a way to explain my posture toward Thanksgiving. The posture I have in mind is probably familiar. I recognize that the events we're meant to celebrate today were part of the first act in a drama of expropriation, colonial aggression, and, depending on how one consents to use this most controversial of terms, genocide. But this recognition does not move me to repudiate the holiday, or to reframe it as a day of mourning. Yesterday I thought bracketing was the key to this ambivalence. Today I think the key to making that point has to do with the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

In 1852, Frederick Douglass gave an address on this question: "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" The occasion and main idea of the address should be apparent from the title. He had been invited to speak in Rochester, NY on July 4th. In 1852. Before the abolition of slavery. So he took the opportunity to reflect on the paradoxes inherent in the occasion. I'll let Douglass speak for himself:  

What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock; 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. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.

It may be obvious why I think of Douglass today, in an attempt to reflect on the meaning of Thanksgiving. We might say on this day - for that matter, on most of our national holidays, even still on July 4th - something very much like what he said on that day in 1852. These days ask us to celebrate hypocrisy, to endorse it, to participate in it. We are meant to celebrate a nation's declaration of freedom without regard for the way that nation has routinely denied freedom to all but its most favored subjects. We are meant to celebrate the birth of a carpenter's son, a man who said 'It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,' with an orgy of consumerism. And we are meant to give thanks for the moment at which different peoples met by ignoring the context and aftermath of that meeting, and repressing the knowledge that the history inaugurated by that meeting might register for some of our fellow citizens as, more than anything else, an occasion for mourning.

Douglass is an important touchstone in the struggle to orient ourselves to the hypocrisy of our holidays because, despite what he said, he never rejected the US completely. He saw that slavery and colonial expropriation and what we now call 'patriarchy' and the like were central to the US that he knew - that is, he rejected the easy thought that injustice in the US was anomalous, unconnected to the basic structure of the country. But he still thought that the basic structure could be improved, that the values ostensibly at the heart of the American experiment were, some of them, acceptable and important.

Douglass models for us an important, I think necessary, posture toward public life in modern nation-states. These states are all and always founded on expropriation and violence, and are typically maintained by the same. But that is not all they are. They also represent horizons of possibility, and some of those possibilities are bound up with the values that these societies claim to endorse - even when they do so hypocritically.

And this is where bracketing comes in. To bracket is not to repudiate or to forget; it is precisely not to do that. To bracket is to set something aside, but only provisionally: to focus for a moment not on what some experience is meant to be, but on what it might be, on how the resources it makes available to you for the creation of your experience might be mobilized in new and more promising ways.

So I can watch and enjoy '300' without denying its unsavory bits, by constructing an experience of the film that takes the results of some ideologically dodgy artistic choices and uses them in another way. This reframing of the cinematic experience begins, as I tried to show yesterday, with a critique of the unsavory bits, and insists on them; but it moves past them to salvage whatever is salvageable from the experience. There is the question of having voted for the film with my dollars, which might signal a less complicated endorsement than the one I'm working toward here. But that just means that it's important to subject the film to public criticism, to use its unavoidable popularity as a way of highlighting the ideological work it does and promoting the kind of cultural literacy (and, some say, 'picturacy' [video link]) that allows us to engage more creatively and critically with these media products.

Similarly: I can celebrate Thanksgiving as an opportunity to, well, give thanks for the good things in life, to enjoy my family, and so on, without denying the holiday's unsavory roots. I can point to the unsavory roots, remind myself and others of them, while using the opportunity to celebrate some things that are indeed worthy of celebration. That point should be stronger: I should point to the day's unsavory roots, and remind myself and others of them. Without the insistence on critique and reflection,  bracketing can slide into evasion, and creative ethical engagement becomes irresponsibility and, in at least one sense of the word, inauthenticity.

I can think of many ways to approach Thanksgiving in this sense of creative critique. Aishah Shahidah Simmons regards it as Indigenous Peoples Remembrance Day, and treats it as a day of reflection and anti-consumerist stillness. Many of us talk to our children about the difference between celebrating family and gratitude and celebrating colonial incursion and genocide. Some of us protest, or march, or participate in other public acts of remembrance and contestation. All of these approaches are valuable, I think, and all can be done in the spirit of an engagement with the idea of Thanksgiving, in the spirit of critique, bracketing, and reframing, rather than in the spirit of critique leading only to repudiation.

If US politics were more interesting and less foolish we might do what South Africa has done with December 16. This day was doubly significant in late-apartheid South Africa. On that day in 1838 the voortrekkers vowed to give thanks to God if they were able to defeat a Zulu force in an impending battle. And so they and their descendants did, year after year. But on the same day in 1961 the ANC formed its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, in the wake of the Sharpesville Massacre, which gave the day annual meaning for black South Africans too. Then in 1995 the post-apartheid government declared that the 16th would be a Day of Reconciliation. This public holiday credits the day's significance for very different communities, but it also signals the annulment and transcendence of the old disputes and the commitment to a new, democratic, multiracial (or, maybe, nonracial) community.

Perhaps one day we'll have a day of reconciliation. Of course, reconciliation begins with recognition - with recognizing that there are divergent viewpoints or interests that need to be reconciled. The US is not there yet with regard to Thanksgiving, which is why the advocates of Unthanksgiving Day are, with many other like-minded people, doing important public work.

Not only is the US not there yet, to the point of establishing the groundwork for reconciliation; I've not even gotten there yet in this post. I've read our national anxiety about what some call 'the Native American Holocaust' through a certain kind of Africana criticism, which began with Douglass and ended up with South Africa. I've yet to recruit into the discussion any voices from the communities with the most at stake in this issue. So I'll close with some words from Frank James, a member of the Wampanoag culture group. As related in the important journal Sojourners (an invaluable publication that every day refutes the assumption that Christian faith is inherently conservative), James was asked to give an address on the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims' landing.

Today is a time of celebrating for you … but it is not a time of celebrating for me. It is with heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People … The Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod four days before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors, and stolen their corn, wheat, and beans … Massasoit, the great leader of the Wampanoag, knew these facts; yet he and his People welcomed and befriended the settlers … little know that … before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoags … and other Indians living near the settlers would be killed by their guns or dead from diseases that we caught from them … Although our way of life is almost gone and our language is almost extinct, we the Wampanoags still walk the lands of Massachusetts … What has happened cannot be changed, but today we work toward a better America, a more Indian America where people and nature once again are important.

The people who commissioned James' address read it beforehand, and rescinded the invitation. But that was forty years ago, and, as he says, today we work toward something better. That work can begin with putting Thanksgiving to work: with making it a day to reflect both on what has happened and on what we might still make happen, if we remain mindful of but not bound by the evils of the past.