Some basic tips for Thanksgiving: Never put mashed potatoes in a food processor or blender because they’ll get gummy; make more gravy even if you think you have enough; do not break bread with people who vote and work against your safety.
Since 2016, November bins of frozen turkeys have arrived alongside a crop of advice columns for dealing with contentious relations around the holiday table. How do we avoid talking about politics? How do we find common ground? How can coming together for a meal bring us together as a nation? The one weird trick to get through holiday dinners without conflict is that you don’t have to.
You do not have to feed or be fed by people who do not believe in your right to bodily autonomy. You do not have to share the intimacy of a meal with people who are enthused about (or even comfortable with) racist and anti-immigrant policies aimed at people of color. You do not have to perform the rote pantomime of civility with people who vote against LGBTQ folks’ human rights. No magic unity will manifest and pop the right-wing disinformation bubble when you pass the peas to someone who doesn’t think you belong in this country as you are. But it will give comfort and the veneer of normalcy to those who’d harm us or allow us to be harmed.
Put a napkin on your lap and get ready to check that cousin if you want to. I get it — sometimes insisting on my right to be somewhere and confronting unacceptable behavior hits the spot like sweet potato pie. If you’re in a position of privilege and/or you’ve got the temperament to call your people in/out, deploy that superpower. (And let me know if you find out how cheap gas has to be to allow these folks to vote for someone who isn’t a rapist.)
But the rest of us can start with the bone-deep knowledge that you don’t have to eat with everybody. Then decide if there’s another way to come together with the people who love and lift you, the family who will fight for you and the ones you love.
Because the truth is that food won’t bring us together. Not even at Thanksgiving. Not when our civil rights are on the table.
Let’s talk turkey tradition. The mythology of Thanksgiving commemorating a joint celebration of the harvest by Native people and Pilgrims covers over the beginning of a 400-year settler campaign of genocide, to the detriment of Indigenous people and communities today. That President Lincoln instituted the Thanksgiving holiday in 1863, in the wake of the Civil War, while the U.S. government was still systematically killing Native people and segregation would still be the law of the land for another century, doesn’t say much for the meal’s power to overcome division.
Foodways, real or constructed by racist imagination, are just as often used as a cudgel to attack marginalized communities. We saw it in the Trump campaign’s wild fabrications and fearmongering about Haitian immigrants in Ohio. And while J.D. Vance was endangering people by amplifying lies about immigrants eating pets, a dehumanizing strategy straight from anti-Asian propaganda, his Indian American wife, Usha Vance, was at podiums telling audiences how he’s learned to cook Indian food. As if his taste for curry meant anything in the face of the violence he was inciting against other immigrant communities.
These are the narratives we’re sold again and again, that if they learn to like our food, they’ll learn to like us. That if we feed or entertain people, they’ll see us as human. As an Asian American working two blocks from where the gallows were erected in Eureka during the Chinese Expulsion of 1885, who worried for her mother as older Asians were beaten in broad daylight after the first Trump administration scapegoated Asians for the spread of COVID, and who is now watching the incoming administration again inflame anti-Asian hate as it targets Chinese immigrants for the first wave of mass deportations, let me tell you: They will eat your food and let you die; they will eat your food and kill you.
There is nothing so soul-affirming as a meal that is a true giving of thanks, a sharing of bounty and a celebration of survival. It’s a joy to share food with others as a means of sharing yourself and your culture with people who care who you are and where you come from. But that can’t happen at a table with people who are working against your survival and siding with those who seek to erase your humanity.
I hope you have plenty — real plenty — on Thanksgiving and you want for nothing. I hope the mashed potatoes are fluffy and you don’t run out of gravy. And I hope when you look around the table, the people who look back are all ready to fight for you and each other, because that is what we’ll have to do to make it to the next one together.
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the arts and features editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400, extension 320, or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Instagram @JFumikoCahill.
This article appears in Bitten.
This is exactly right.