Holiday reinforces discrimination

I LIKE GETTING school off as much as the next guy, but this week, I’m going to be finding it hard to enjoy these few days that we have off from school this week.

I cannot bring myself to celebrate Thanksgiving this year; rather, I will be boycotting the holiday, spending the day in protest, probably watching “Borat” or something.

I haven’t always been opposed to Thanksgiving. Indeed, even through last year, I’ve always had a particular affection for stuffing and that green bean casserole with the little crunchy things on top.

This year, there are no green beans for me, though. There will be no crunchy things, no stuffing, as I’ve realized, after a few truly eye-opening experiences, that Thanksgiving, despite seeming rather innocuous and even trumpeting the virtues of benevolence and generosity, is a holiday designed to reassert the dominance of the white man over all the rest of this wide earth.

Consider the following household scene: a football game is on in the entertainment room and on the couch opposite the TV, the “man” of the household is spread out, motionless, slobbering and half-awake, with a couple of his brothers-in-law, maybe even his father, in the same position.

In the kitchen beside him, his wife, mother, aunts, sisters and cousins are all working hard to prepare the best meal of the year.

Thanksgiving, far from fostering any sense of equality and compassion, just reinforces and perpetuates the misogynistic notion that a wife’s place is in the kitchen, cooking food for their respective husbands.

And if the women are occupied with cooking and the men with sloth and oppression, where does this leave the children? To play with dangerous knives, in all probability.

At the center of all this cooking is the bird: the most important part of the modern Thanksgiving feast is the turkey. Only the highest-ranking female is allowed to work on the turkey and the success of the Thanksgiving meal is contingent on how she does her job — the quality of the turkey, in a sense, is subconsciously interpreted as the quality of the woman who cooks it.

Indeed, I have seen a few Thanksgiving dinners that have ended in divorce, and in once case, execution.

Once the turkey is done cooking, the ritual Thanksgiving dinner has the highest-ranking male reasserting his dominance over the female.

The issue of rank, by the way, is modular, and is often dependent on the household involved.

In any case, the alpha male finds the best knife he owns — assuming he can find where his nephews buried it while he was watching football — and proceeds to divvy up the bird.

The most prized portions of the turkey are, unsurprisingly, the breast and the legs.

Even the language used in Thanksgiving discourse is misogynistic — the aforementioned ritual is referred to as “carving.”

This terminology, assuming the correlation between the female and the turkey, suggests simultaneously that the woman is something to be “carved,” shaped, portioned, and tossed to the dogs if she turns out too dry.

And the story of the first Thanksgiving, notoriously inaccurate among third-grade classrooms across the United States, suggests not only an androcentrism, but is racist and subliminally alleges the superiority of the white man above his Native American brothers.

The story, as I remember it, is as follows: during the first Thanksgiving, the white pilgrims were so grateful that the Indians helped them stay alive that they even let them eat with them.

Let? As if Squanto and Company really needed the white man’s permission to enjoy a few bites of fish, some pumpkin and whatever fruit they had in a “real” cornucopia.

And you can rest assured that even they insisted that Pocahontas and Sacagawea spend the day in kitchen cooking it all up for them.

The feast was supposed to have lasted three days, but I’m certain that on the fourth day, Governor Bradford was up to his old tricks: “Excuse me fellas, we’ve such a large country here, can’t you just scoot a little to the left?”

So, join me this Thanksgiving in boycotting turkey and mashed potatoes. Together, we can expose Thanksgiving as the racist, sexist “holiday” that it is.

By all means though, enjoy your days off from school.

Comment on this story in the Opinion forum >>