Thanksgiving: A Menticide

by Nehemi’EL Ibrihim-Simms
Two things characterize the American holiday: intense commercialization and the reinforcement of European cultural hegemony. These holidays, gilded and packaged in cheap moral drapery, serve to simultaneously spur the American economy while buttressing the state-sanctioned ignorance of its tax-payer to a gluttony and hedonism that characterizes the foundational social contradiction that is driving Western civilization to oblivion.
The American holiday that best elucidates the foundational social contradiction is Thanksgiving. The spirit of Thanksgiving mirrors the complexity of the legacy of this entire civilization. Overtly, there is an ethos of togetherness, family, sharing, gratitude, and other honorable character traits. On the other hand, the underlying ethos of this holiday is quite literally soaked in blood and representative of a wider psycho-cultural schizophrenia.

Dr. Ishakamusa Barashango, historian and Afro-Centered educator, avers that “Thanksgiving Day literally is a holiday celebrating the beginnings of the almost total extermination of an entire race of people, commonly called ‘Indians’ and the enslavement, continued oppression and genocide of the Afrikan, by European settlers.”
Thanksgiving is the starting pistol that whips the American hyper-consumer into a shopping frenzy, reaching its zenith with Christmas. This is a chance for those of us who sit at the bottom of the social hierarchy to enjoy our imperialist crumbs. This holiday, marketed around the recognition of the importance of family and the gratitude for life, is, in actuality, a celebration of the accomplishment of Manifest Destiny, effectively laying the groundwork for the hedonism and expansion inspired by the tag-team effort of the American corporatist and the military-industrial complex to satisfy bottom-lines and feed notions of civilizational superiority.

It would be improper to leave out a brief acknowledgment of what Marx calls the “primitive accumulation” of wealth in this country and the West, necessary for the industrialization of Europe and North America, was the theft of land and labor, violation of treaties, and the 300-year trade in African skin. What we call the “holiday spirit,” at least to unsuspecting Black Folks, is the motivation to participate in the celebration of the ongoing attempt at destroying African and Indigenous civilizations.
The history told by Dr. Barashango, and others like him is not as marketable anymore like in the old days of Trump’s nostalgic “Great America.” It is more convenient for the consciousness of the American, white, black or otherwise, which resists qualitative change, to tell the story of a dinner between two separate groups of people who eventually found a way to settle their differences, all without mentioning that this settlement was based on the wholesale genocide and enslavement of one group.
It is expedient to the maintenance of the false internal peace of the nation to propagate that narrative, without mentioning that the parasitic relationship, symbolically established by the folktale of “Thanksgiving,” persists until this day and is responsible for the material stature of this “Great Republic.”

The National Retail Federation, the world’s largest retail trade association, released a report on November 2nd, 2023, entitled “2023 Holiday Spending to Reach Record Levels,” wherein holiday spending is surmised to “reach record levels November and December” and to “grow between 3% and 4% over 2022 to between $957.3 billion and $966.6 billion.” I don’t think a genocide-themed Thanksgiving would sell as well.
The American is a drug addict whose choice of drug is the belief in the superiority of our way of life and the way in which this way of life developed, all packaged in a baggie called “e pluribus unum.” And like all drug addicts, the American is delusory, running from a haunting reality that, if confronted, would destroy the fragile self-image.
While there is a section of Americans that actively acknowledge the lie and choose to protest the menticide, a great portion of us do the exact opposite. The involved parent recognizes these Western holidays as the perfect opportunity to teach their children about this society’s structural contradictions and how corporations exploit the complicity and absent-mindedness of the American consumer.

During this time, instead of gorging yourself and your family with food, use this time that you presumably have off from work and that the children have off from school to create an educational experience around the real history of Thanksgiving. Historians like J.A Rogers, William Leo Hansberry, and Ishakamusa Barashango are good starts.
It is our duty, as African People, to use these holidays to heighten the awareness of the children closest to us in hopes of finding a cure to the psychosis that is Western civilization.