White American Thanksgiving

For my international readers, today, November 26th, is a national holiday here in the U.S. called Thanksgiving. It's a day during which we do what we can to further our national epidemic of obesity. We're also meant to think about what we're thankful for. I wrote down some of my thoughts about what I'm thankful for on this holiday.

I want to express my gratitude, on this day, that I was born White--that I am part of the powerful majority rather than an oppressed minority, and thus that I can enjoy all the benefits of that status, such as never having gotten arrested, or having learned to speak and read and write in such a way that I can get high paying jobs and can propogate this power structure on to my children and my children's children. I'm thankful for my White Pilgrim Fathers, who celebrated the First Thanksgiving with their Pokanoket friends back in 1621--Pokanoket friends who sought them out for military alliance because they needed some help after so many of them had died from the smallpox which my White Pilgrim Fathers had brought to North America. I'm thankful that my White Pilgrim fathers won so decisively, a mere 55 years later, when they went to war with their Pokanoket former friends over the lands which these savages claimed my White Pilgrim Fathers were stealing. I'm thankful that there were 4 times as many deaths among the Pokanoket savages (whose fathers had been there to help make the first Thanksgiving possible) than there were among my White Pilgrim Fathers, a war proportionality which would only grow in our favor in the 350 years to come. I'm thankful for the way in which this war and other early wars against the merciless Indian Savages* helped form our identity as a nation where White People like me hold and exercise the power. I'm thankful that the end result is that now we white Americans are able to spend more than the rest of the world combined, some $650 billion annually, on armaments and military, and that following from this I am in the top 10% of wage earners in the world, and have never experienced hunger or homelessness or much of anything really unpleasant at all for a single day of my entire life. I'm thankful to be white, to be male, and to be at the top of the pack in a world where 1 billion (mostly non-White) people have no access to fresh water and 2 billion (mostly non-White) people live on $2 a day or less. I feel like shouting with joy and gratitude! Wooooooohooooooooot!

*Note: "merciless Indian savages" is a phrase which I have borrowed from that brilliant document my White Pilgrim Fathers authored--the U.S. Declaration of Independence.