About Thanksgiving

[nanila]

A thing happened recently that I didn't feel comfortable addressing directly with the person involved, so it's turned into a journal post.

Someone felt the need to go on a diatribe to me about how it's a travesty that Americans continue to celebrate Thanksgiving, a holiday built on what can mildly be described as false premises.

Every year I post a picture to Facebook of Wednesday Addams holding a match and delivering the following speech about Thanksgiving.

You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear cardigans, and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the road sides. You will play golf, and enjoy hot hors d'oeuvres. My people will have pain and degradation. Your people will have stick shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They have said, "Do not trust the Pilgrims, especially Sarah Miller."...And for all these reasons I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground.

Despite this, every year, I make an effort to celebrate Thanksgiving. Since I've had the space to do so, I've invited as many people as I can cater for to my home and fed them, at the very least, on pumpkin pie and wine. Because I also believe that despite its hugely problematic origins, the saccharine mythology of which continues to be propagated in American schools, it is possibly one of the nicest American traditions in the way it is actually practiced. I have on many occasions not been able to be with my own family on Thanksgiving, including the entirety of the last decade. Yet because of the generosity of friends, colleagues and casual acquaintances, I have never felt alone or unloved on this holiday. When most Americans hear that you haven't got anywhere to be on Thanksgiving, they will immediately invite you to their own celebration, even if they don't know you well, and the invitation will be sincere. You don't have to take it if you don't want to. But the option is always there - to be fed a nice meal, in company of people in good spirits, which in my world is one of the best things you can ever do for others.

I know the origin stories of America, especially as taught to young Americans, are full of inconsistencies and glaring omissions. I know that Americans have, to put it mildly, not always behaved well as colonists. If I were to get romantic about it, I could argue that I embody the conflict between colonial and colonised interests from the cultural right down to the genetic level, given my parents' national and racial origins.

I also know that in choosing to become British, I have taken on the mantle of possibly the most notorious of the modern colonialist oppressors. And I know that in choosing to emigrate permanently, I have given up on participation in a large portion of the culture I was brought up in. I spend 99% of my time immersed in British culture. My partner is British. My children will grow up predominantly British.

So. I get angry when someone feels the need to tell me that, of the 1% of my time that I choose deliberately to celebrate something that is American, I shouldn't be doing it. Perhaps, O White English Person, the next time you feel the need to dress someone down for clinging to a tiny portion of the culture in which they grew up, you should consider that you are possibly not the most appropriate mouthpiece of justice.

Comments

[cosmolinguist]

In previous years I've been left slack-jawed at how much anti-American sentiment people feel fine about hurling at me on the subject of/around the time of Thanksgiving. I remember one particularly vile tweet being one of the last straws that got me off of Twitter for good.

I do think most British people -- and probably even most Americans -- don't think about how much change and compromise and accommodation is required even for someone from a country so similar to move here and make a life here.

That the stereotypical-British conception of America is as an irrevocable inferior doesn't help: I'm often left with the impression that I should be glad I'm privileged with the opportunity to renounce my Americanness and replace it with good proper Britishism. To cling on to the inferior choice when I have the option of banishing it from my life seems to strike a lot of people as baffling, silly, or a sign that I really am inferior because I don't recognize the superiority of Britain in all things.

Thank you for writing this. It's really hard for me to untangle all this stuff in my head (Thanksgiving is, to put it mildly, fraught and complicated for reasons specific to me, so it's hard to tease out the generalities) and it helps so much that you share your thoughts on subjects like this.

[davidgillon]

I think there's a real underestimation of how different we are, because people are misled by the common language thing. I've worked extensively with (both remotely via telecons and sharing the next desk to) both Americans and Europeans, and I'm absolutely convinced that, in general, Brits are culturally/psychologically/politically closer to Europeans than Americans.

But people expect Americans to be just Brits with a funny accent, and when that turns out not to be the case, judgements can be harsher than needed. (And, of course, that also applies vice versa).

[cosmolinguist]

I do think Britain is more like Europe, though I think politically since Thatcher, at least, and culturally since the internet made it easier to get U.S. films and TV shows at the same time that people in the U.S. did (and vice versa, to the extent of Doctor Who and Sherlock at least) and share a culture of talking about these things, that has been becoming less true. With the rise of xenophobia and anti-European sentiment that UKIP have been riding, Britain's willingness to follow the U.S. into inadvisable wars when (almost) no one else will, and an increasing stigma against people on any kind of benefits even as those who need them struggle more and more just to survive, I do see the UK reminding me more of the U.S. all the time. But even people quite happy to talk obsessively at me about Game of Thrones or how exciting it is that "red cups" are in Starbucks again also tell me that America's crap and American things are crap and as an American I should be ashamed...not quite in so many words, usually (though sometimes it is!). The cognitive dissonance can be tiring to deal with.

[davidgillon]

Unfortunately the rise of xenophobia thing is pretty much Europe-wide, so I don't think that's really a shift towards the US, more a consequence of the ongoing depression. The anti-Europe thing is just xenophobia on a different scale, some of UKIP's partner parties are even worse on the subject.

The military intervention thing is pretty much proceeding along historical lines IMO, Britain and France have a history of intervening in Africa and Asia due to colonial history and ties that's actually gone on fairly consistently since the end of WWII, the other NATO nations have been responding in accordance with how tightly they're bound to NATO aims (the Poles for instance) and local circumstances/politics (which is why the Germans keep swinging from one pole to the other). The interesting change for me is Sweden, which has gone from absolute neutrality to a more typical European position, without shifting any closer to the US.

(rant warning)

There actually is clear evidence that the shift on benefits was triggered by the US insurer Unum, which nobbled the Labour Party back in the late 90s into backing its ideas (which are mostly based around right-wing American sociologist Talcott Parson's concept of the 'socially deviant' 'sick role', and which in the States led to it losing a humongous class action for running 'disability denial mills' and the New York State DA branding it 'an outlaw company'), eventually resulting in the catastrophe that is Atos and the WCA. Notably Unum funded a professorship for DWP's chielf medical offier, which churns out papers backing Unum's idea that disabled people are just lazy, while Unum's chief medical officer in the UK jumped ship to Atos, and has now jumped ship again to Maximus, the US company that's taking over the Atos role on the basis of bidding to do it for £50m a year less than the only other company that was willing to bid. Because what can possibly go wrong when you hand a fundamentally flawed programme, with a record for abusing the most vulnerable people, to a US company with a record of abusing disabled people, on a low-ball bid. And to cap all that, we now find that Disability Rights-UK, supposedly an umbrella group for UK disability charities, is taking Unum money to participate in a scheme to show that everyone buying Unum's disability insurance (the one they wouldn't pay out on in the first place) would fix everything *headdesk*

(/end rant)

[nanila]

I think there's a real underestimation of how different we are, because people are misled by the common language thing.

This tallies with my own experience as well. And even the common language isn't quite as common as it first appears. If I ever slip up and use American terminology for something (gas instead of petrol, kleenex instead of tissue, shift instead of change gears) I can pretty much guarantee that someone will feel the need to point it out.

I don't have quite as much experience of the European POV on Americans v Brits, but that summer school I attended in July made me realise that when many Europeans assume you're a Brit because they can't parse your accent properly, they will happily badmouth Americans to you for hours.

[davidgillon]

Winces!

I'm far from innocent in criticizing US policies, but there's a difference between that and critizing Americans en-masse. Some individual Americans, definitely, and some groups (Koch brothers and climate-change deniers I'm looking at you!), but not Americans in general and you just don't corner any random English speaker to rant at them!