by Daniella Dane, Ronald “Elder” Freeman Policy Fellow
Every November, Americans gather to celebrate gratitude, family, and unity, remembering the story of Pilgrims and Native Americans coming together for a feast in 1621. However, this story was fabricated as a means to support the historical narrative that the United States was created on the principle of equality. Thanksgiving was designed to conceal the country’s roots of colonization, genocide, and slavery. This holiday is a tool, used to sell us a false story under the guise of a celebration. It conceals the realities of violence and dispossession upon which the United States was built while simultaneously obscuring the ongoing exploitation of marginalized communities. By glorifying white benevolence while erasing Black trauma and suffering, the distorted story and lie of Thanksgiving perpetuates historical erasure and reinforces a national identity built on myths of generosity, unity, and innocence rather than the realities of exploitation, oppression, slavery, and systemic violence.
The origin “story” of Thanksgiving paints a harmonious picture of Pilgrims struggling to survive in a foreign land who were rescued by the Wampanoag people, culminating in a joyful feast. That idea is no more than an illusion: in fact, Indigenous populations were intentionally decimated by violence and diseases weaponized by European colonists. Colonists and Indigenous peoples did not harvest alongside each other in unison; rather, colonists began their centuries-long campaign to wipe out Native nations and assert control over Indigenous people by stealing land, plundering resources, and systematically destroying and killing Native people.
Thanksgiving peddles a myth of cooperation while concealing genocide and the extreme violence of colonization. European colonists committed massacres, stripping Native people of both their lands and their independence. The Wampanoag in New England, often portrayed as willing helpers in the Thanksgiving story, were subject to land theft, the dismantling of their families, and the kidnapping of their children—which was and continues to be an intentional strategy to erase Indigenous culture and sovereignty.
While this was happening, enslaved Africans were already present in the United States, supporting the survival of European colonists through forced labor. Again, families were separated, children were taken from their parents, and generations were subjected to the constant violence of slavery.
Systemic violence against Black and Indigenous families did not end with slavery. What was once the boarding school system now operates through the juvenile justice system and Child Protective Services; slavery evolved into incarcerated labor. The violence that once ripped Black and Indigenous children from their families transformed into what currently operates as the state’s project of surveilling, correcting, and policing communities of color. The legacy of erasure by removing Black, Indigenous, and Brown children from their families and communities persists today.
The logic of erasure continues in modern institutions like Child Protective Services (CPS) and Structured Decision Making (SDM), a system that evaluates the risks and safety for children in the home. While SDM is presented as neutral and “colorblind,” it is in reality a weapon of racialized family policing. The assessment relies on factors like neighborhood, income, prior CPS involvement, and family structure, all of which are rooted in racism and classism. Families labeled “high risk” are overwhelmingly Black, Indigenous, Latinx, or impoverished. Black, Indigenous, and Brown families are disproportionately investigated and separated, while white, affluent families face less scrutiny. SDM codifies oppression into institutionalized language and government legislation, where statistical “risk” becomes a tool to justify surveillance, intervention, and child removal, reflecting a legacy of state control that began with colonization and slavery.
Recognizing SDM’s role in targeting marginalized families shows that patterns of control are not something of the past; they endure today. Both Thanksgiving and SDM mask oppression and exploitation. Thanksgiving glorifies the “proper” family, erasing Native and Black communities. SDM enforces a Euro-American vision of parenting while policing families who do not conform to dominant norms. Both legitimize repressive authority: one through the fictional historical narrative of the country, and the other through state surveillance.
Historical memory and modern surveillance operate together to tell a story: certain lives are valuable, and others are disposable. The government, through both false narratives and legislative policies, dictates who is worthy of autonomy and protection and who should continue to be exploited and abused. Any attempt to redeem Thanksgiving must entail confronting the violent truths it conceals: genocide, slavery, and racialized policing. Indigenous movements, like the National Day of Mourning, challenge the sanitized narrative and center voices erased by history.
Reimagining Thanksgiving as a day of truth-telling and resistance allows reflection on the resilience of Native, Black, and Brown communities and confronting the systems that punish marginalized families under the guise of care, concern, and protection. Thanksgiving is not an innocent celebration; it erases genocide, slavery and racialized family policing. From the colonial myth of Pilgrims and Native Americans to SDM in CPS, the United States has masked oppression under the false narrative of progress. Confronting this truth is necessary to expose how historical and current systems of control continue to police, punish, and break marginalized communities.
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