FOR BLACK PEOPLE, Thanksgiving is a time to show gratitude for the precious opportunity to see family members and share a festive meal together one more time.
Holidays are human-made events to usually cultivate a sense of civic pride and appreciation. The problem is that when empires create holidays, there is inevitably going to be a large measure of mendacity mixed in the message.
School children are taught that Columbus “discovered America.” This is one classic example that is punctuated with prevarications.
How do you discover a place where people already lived for thousands of years? How do you ignore the brutal way that Columbus made contact with indigenous people? How do you ignore the fact that Columbus never set foot in North America?
Holidays are human-made events usually to generate civic pride and appreciation for the government sponsoring and promoting them, and when empires create holidays there are bound to be inaccuracies and skewed perspectives.
We have just celebrated the Thanksgiving Holiday. It is documented that the first Thanksgiving occurred in 1621 with so-called pilgrims feasting in Plymouth, Massachusetts, along with Indigenous people from the Wampanoag tribe who had already occupied the land for thousands of years.
Traditional pictures display pilgrims and Native people enjoying themselves and sharing a bountiful harvest of food.
The obvious problem is that what has been taught from schools to homes lumps all indigenous people together as “Indians” and totally ignores the identities of the various Indigenous people and refused to name the Wampanoag tribe and their history in this story.
Most people could not tell you who those Indigenous people were because of the myth-making machine of settler colonial intrusion.
It also ignores the fact that things were not as amicable as has been made out to be. The voices and perspectives of the Wampanoag people have been deliberately left out of history and their contradicting view on what actually happened to their ancestors at the hands of pilgrims from Europe.
That is why African American people in many cases are not as wedded to the prevaricating propaganda about the Thanksgiving Holiday as other people. Many, if not most, African American families gather together on the Thanksgiving Holiday to celebrate family, fellowship and gratefulness to God for the blessing to be in the number for another year.
For Black people it is a time to show gratitude for the precious opportunity to see family members and share a festive meal together one more time.
The menu of many Black families will resemble the national menu of turkey, cranberry sauce, an assortment of vegetables, and macaroni and cheese with the notable exception that Black people serve dressing and not stuffing. There is a difference in the two, trust me.
In our church, we used to have a ceremony on Thanksgiving morning called Umoja Karamu, which means in Swahili “Feast of unity.” It is a celebration of the Black family that was begun by Dr. Edward Simms, Jr., in 1971.
The ceremony celebrates five periods of African American life each represented by a color that is used in the ceremony: Period 1 “Prior to Slavery,” Period 2 “In Slavery,” period 3 “Upon Emancipation, Period 4 “The Struggle for Liberation,” and period 5 “Looking to the future.”
People living under oppression create ways to show gratefulness for the opportunity to gather together, share a delicious meal, enjoy fellowship and help to find meaning for the present and the future.
Meaning-making is important for Black people in America, as they navigate the inconsistencies in the general narratives of a nation that once held them in bondage and now under the encroachment of conservative people, mostly in a particular party who vow to take the nation back to a time when Black people “had no rights that any white person had to respect,” the Dred Scott decision of 1857.
Meaning-making is also a biblical reality. Hebrew people in bondage in Babylon were also forced to create meaning-making while languishing in forced protracted labor for their oppressors.
In that context among the prevaricating narratives of the Babylonian Empire celebrating their subjugating heritage, those same subjugated Hebrew people needed to find meaning in their nadir moments. Many sang a song of longing in Psalm 137, “By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion…”
Yet the prophet Jeremiah writing in the book titled Lamentations crafted these words to create a sense of meaning and hope when he wrote, “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion; therefore, I will wait for him.” It is a song of gratefulness to a God who was able to sustain and keep them despite what their oppressors had done to them. It is a song of praise to God who not only sustained them but a God who would eventually vindicate them and lead them out of bondage.
That same Jeremiah wrote these words to signal that their time of suffering was coming to an end, “I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord. Plans not to harm you but to prosper you. Plans to give you hope and a future.” In other words, in the language of my ancestors, “trouble don’t last always…”
That biblical poem/song was made into a hymn that is popular, especially among Black congregants over 50 years old. The hymn by the same name proclaims, “Great is Thy Faithfulness O Lord unto me.” It is popular because it celebrates people of faith coming together who have been subjected to the skewed narratives of their oppressors, but this same people know that, “if it had not been for the lord who was on their side,” they would not have endured.
It is a Thanksgiving to God among Black people for how God has allowed family to gather together one more time, remember elders who have become ancestors, to share good food and fellowship and express gratefulness to a God who is still able to “do exceeding and abundantly more than we could ever ask or think,” even in times of chaos and crisis.
This is the spirit of gratefulness and what Thanksgiving is about for many African Americans that carried through the entire holiday season.
Blessings Beloved!