I was going to post this under the Thanksgiving Open Thread. But I think this topic deserves its own space. My question: is the Thanksgiving Holiday racist?

Oftentimes (as recently exemplified in the Community Values advertising brochure) Thanksgiving is viewed as a celebration of the cooperation between early European immigrants (the pilgrims) and the First Peoples. Nations were already present and well-established on this continent, when conquerors from Europe arrived some 500+ years ago, and settlers subsequently began to arrive afterward.

I have a hard time disassociating the myth of cooperation from the brutal conquest of this continent. It has been the "Manifest Destiny" whereby Europeans have driven Native groups and people out of traditional territories, spreading death, disease, killing, and war across the land.

Is it disingenuous to celebrate the notion of cooperation, when the larger truth is of killing, murder and horribly violent conquest?

I am particularly interested in hearing the perspective of members of groups that have been traditionally (and/or still are) oppressed. How do you relate? How do you feel about Thanksgiving in regard to the conquest of the land and Native peoples? What's your story?

As a side conversation to the illuminating occurrence of Councilmember Kingsbury's Public Comment Facebooking session, I have thought about my own handling of such racist, derogatory and hurtful comments as the ones Moses brings to the Council.

First, instead of gaveling - interrupt him at first mention. As politely as possible, again (importantly) - at first mention of a racist or derogatory term - interrupt him and ask him whether or not he knows that the term in question, for example, "mulatto," is offensive, derogatory and hurtful.

If he says no - that is - that he did not know the term is derogatory, then ask him to refrain from using it.

If he says yes - that he is aware of the racist and derogatory nature of the term, then ask him if he knows that the use of such a term is hurtful and harmful. Then inform, clearly, him of the hurtful nature of his commentary.

Ask him if he intends to put others down. If no, ask for an apology, and that he refrain from doing it anymore. If yes, then ask him why. Show him that someone, at least, cares about him. - That may be what he really needs. Maybe he is just horribly lonely, and sick, and doesn't know positive ways to reach out to people.

I am not a psychologist, but maybe I'll even venture to make a diagnosis.

Maybe Moses is sick - maybe he is wounded. Maybe he is injured, hurt by society. It's obvious that he needs attention. Maybe people can help him to find a positive, mutually beneficial, way to get that attention. As humans, we (almost all of us) need attention.

This society could benefit from a heaping dose of nonviolent communication. City Council would be a great place to start.

So that's a sort of an along the lines picture of how I would intend to handle a situation as it presented itself.

Are we living in the dark ages? I just got the November/ December issue of "Community Values Magazine -- Elite Thurston County Edition" and was horrified to see blatantly racist images of stereotypical Native Americans that any Native person would be offended by.

Do people really still believe that all Native American people wear a plains Indian chief's head dress? It’s high time that the mythical, so-called traditional, Thanksgiving dinner meme, where Settlers and Indigenous people supposedly "shared" a meal, be put to rest. The picture is even complete with a stereotypical "drunken Indian."

This is absolutely shameful and humiliating. It is clear that these "Community Values" consist of conspicuous racism, history revision, and disregard for the dignity of local tribes and Native American people in general. Would it be acceptable to portray any other ethnic group, such as African Americans, or people of the Jewish faith in this light?

This publication, and it's supporters, the Tumwater Area Chamber of Commerce, Thurston County Chamber of Commerce, and Lacey Chamber of Commerce, as well as the participating businesses, and the graphic design studio, Atlanta based Pixelution Studios, should be ashamed. Beyond that, they should be held accountable for publishing this detestable image, which can only serve to further alienate Native peoples. It certainly does not encourage me to patronize those businesses.

The excellent blog Orcinus has a new post on How to Out A Sundown Town. Clear instructions are given on how to research the secret history of your town.

The historical fact is that if you're a middle-class white American living in the north or west of the country, the odds are overwhelmingly good that the town you live in, right now, is a sundown town -- or was one at some point in the not-so-distant past.

You say that race doesn't matter.  You say that qualifications are all that counts in employment and education.  You say that money is all that matters in lending and other market exchanges.  You say that you're color-blind, and that it's time to overturn affirmative action programs.  In fact, you say that affirmative action is reverse-racism.

You adamantly insist that you are not a racist, either overtly or unconsciously.

Now's your chance to prove it.  Either you have no racist tendencies or preferences... or this is your "Come to Jesus" moment.

Take the test.

Post your results.  (Be brave!) 

Go here to take the test, then click on "Race IAT". 

This is from Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, and shows the extraordinary affect that racial stereotypes and internalized oppression can have on test scores.

I'll first offer the snippet from the book, then offer a brief explaination of the word "priming", then I'll post Gladwell's sources at the end. [Emphasis added by myself.]

The psychologists Claude Steel and Joshua Aronson created an even more extreme version of this test, using black college students and twenty questions taken from the Graduate Record Examination, the standardized test used for entry into graduate school. When the students were asked to identify their race on a pretest questionaire, that simple act was sufficient to prime them with all the negative stereotypes associated with African Americans and academic achievement - and the number of items they got right was cut in half. As a society, we place enormous faith in tests because we think they are a reliable indicator of the test taker's ability and knowledge. But are they really? If a white student from a prestigious private high school gets a higher SAT score than a black student from an inner-city school, is it because she's truly a better student, or is it because to be white and to attend a prestigious high school is to be constantly primed with the idea of "smart"?...

..."I talked to the black students afterward, and I asked them, 'Did anything lower your performance?'" Aronson said. "I would ask, 'Did it bug you that I asked you to indicate your race?' Because it clearly had a huge effect on their performance. And they would always say no and something like 'You know, I just don't think I'm smart enough to be here.'"

There's been quite a bit of discussion on Olyblog lately about racism and white priviledge.  There are two things I'd like to point out here.

The first is that there has been a lack of concrete evidence describing the reality of insitutional racism in our discussions.  Educational inequality, environmental racism, white flight, etc have only been hinted at.  I'd like to strongly recommend the book Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol to anyone who is interested in the issue, or who doubts that institutional racism is a reality.  The book describes the current state of segregation in the school system (schools are currently more divided along lines of race than they were before Brown v Board of Education), and provides a wealth of data, case studies, and anecdotal information showing that poor black students get a lot less funding for their education than middle class white students.

The story of East St. Louis (I'll abbreviate: "ESL") stands out the strongest in the book.  At the time that Savage Inequalities was written (I don't know if anything has changed or how), ESL was an extraordinarily poor, predominantly black neighborhood separated from the white middle class neighborhoods by a river.