Some liberal girl on Thanksgiving

In light of the recent “holiday,” I am taking over Gossip Bro’s sexist and racist column this week to tell people what they are actually celebrating when they sit so complacently at their “Thanksgiving” tables. These people are the same people who refer to Columbus Day as a holiday, not even recognizing that he was actually a MONSTER who massacred hundreds if not millions of Native Americans! HAPPY NATIVE AMERICAN GENOCIDE DAY EVERYONE.

I know about this because unlike you I’ve actually opened up a Howard Zinn book and read about the atrocities behind America’s TRUE history, the one that your spoon-fed mainstream media would never dare to mention. Thanksgiving is not only a monument to white people who think they deserve everything (oh, hey Duke students!). Even worse, it commemorates everything wrong with what we did to the Native Americans and the fact that we celebrate it as a holiday of thanks just further insults the once proud and noble people who are the Native Americans.

Maybe you don’t know what I’m talking about, and maybe you just right me off as another college girl who is angry about some cause because I ACTUALLY use my brain instead of worrying about what boots go with what leggings and what sorority letters will go with my boobs. You’re right, I am angry. Maybe I am a “GDI.” And maybe, just maybe, I’m not actually caught in the Duke bubble where you’re too busy complaining about Tailgate and other superficial issues to actually notice that there is racism all around you, EVEN IN THE HOLIDAYS YOU SO IGNORANTLY CELEBRATE, and it just further perpetuates our ethnocentric mindset. WAKE UP SHEEPLE!

You probably didn’t know that the Europeans who arrived in America discovered a peaceful people with no weapons, only to turn around and give them diseases and make them slaves and stab pregnant women, only to name a few. It was really bad. You probably didn’t know that the Wampanoag people, the beautiful and honorable native tribe that Thanksgiving is supposed to celebrate our cooperation with, were actually exploited until they all died. I know it’s probably not what you want to hear because it clashes with your cookie-cutter Disney story Pocahontas image of Native America, but you’re all guilty.

You sit there, happily stuffing your face with turkey, assuming that you’re the greatest because a white man discovered America and made everything so great, but you probably didn’t even know that the Chinese discovered America first. Oh, you didn’t hear that? I didn’t think so; it’s not something you would be taught in your ethnocentric school. Maybe you should open up a Gavin Menzies book and read about how the Chinese explorers came to America in 1421 way before the “hero” that you think came here in 1492.

So is exploitation and murder what we are celebrating? Are we giving thanks for racism and alienation? In my Writing 20 class freshman year we learned about the concept of the “Other,” and on this holiday this idea of alienation is rife. But you don’t realize the otherization of other peaceful cultures and you continue to give thanks and then go out shopping on what you so racistly call “Black Friday,” only furthering the consumeristic nature of our gluttonous and irrespectful society.

So go ahead, eat your turkeys (who also have NO voice when you pluck them and kill them) and laugh with your families that all those Native Americans never got to have.

Lady Blue

Residential Assistant, Pegram Dormitory

Women’s Center Ally