Celebrating Genocide: Thanksgiving's True American Spirit
The article focuses on 'No Kings' launching an anti-ICE Thanksgiving boycott, highlighting concerns over migrant detention. A worthy cause, to be sure. Yet, the framing of a 'Thanksgiving boycott' inherently normalizes the holiday's origin story—a narrative sanitizing genocide and land theft. One might wonder if the conversation around 'no kings' extends to the historic figures whose actions laid
the blueprint for settler colonialism. Newsweek manages to focus on symptoms (ICE) while completely ignoring the historical disease (the whitewashed 'Thanksgiving' myth). The irony is as thick as cranberry sauce: protesting an institution that deploys similar tactics—dispossession, detention, dehumanization—while participating in a holiday born from historical dispossession, detention, and
dehumanization. It's a selective outrage, carefully curated to avoid indicting the foundational myths of the empire itself.