If you want to undo a nation, you start by falsifying its history until no one remembers anything but the “endless present.” Thus, every Thanksgiving it seems like fewer Americans know the true history of this national holiday commemorating our nation’s founding myth.
No one who knows the true history of the first Thanksgiving can ever doubt that the Pilgrims paid a greater price for their meal than anything we ever will.
We chose the Pilgrims and their establishment of the Plymouth Colony in 1620 as the date of “our true founding” in order to repudiate the practice of slavery that was established in the colonies in 1619. By doing so, we affirmed that our nation was conceived in liberty, not racism.
We choose the Pilgrims as our founding myth because they embodied our most cherished ideals. They were the best of us. We celebrate their story to acknowledge our highest aspirations, not to whitewash our history or minimize our mistakes. Thanksgiving affirms who we want to be because it is about who the Pilgrims actually were.