History is filled with reasons to be embarrassed about being white.

Caucasian Americans do not have the greatest track record as far as human rights are concerned. We enslaved Africans for centuries. We stood by as Adolph Hitler came to power. We evacuated and relocated thousands of our own Japanese Americans during World War II so we could keep a better eye on them.

To be frank, we just aren’t very nice people.

I know that we are not proud of these accomplishments. Many of us would take them back, if we were able to.

I mean, it’s not like we’re out celebrating that all this occurred?

Oh, wait. Yeah, we are.

We actually celebrate our complete disregard for another culture every year at the end of November.

It’s called Thanksgiving.

I don’t understand it. We don’t observe a National Slavery Day, do we? We don’t cook up a bunch of food and sit around, saying, “gee, this sure isn’t like the good ‘ole days when the house slave could’ve done it for us for free, huh?” (Maybe they might, in some backwoods, Confederate flag-waving community in Mississippi somewhere, but otherwise probably not.)

Why do we really celebrate Thanksgiving? We are taught at a young age that we celebrate it in the name of friendship between the Pilgrims and Native Americans, when they shared a feast together one fateful day in late November of 1621. And everyone was so happy to see each other, and they talked and laughed and cooperated and blah blah blah…

Does anyone buy this for more than like, five seconds? Come on. I may have believed this story when I was six, and that was only because I liked making little Pilgrim hats in my first grade class out of construction paper.

There are major holes in this plot.

First of all, the Pilgrims were morons. They came over on their Mayflower ship and when they got here, they kind of just stood around going, “what do we do?” Big ideas, absolutely no planning ability.

Luckily for them, the Native Americans were here to teach them some skills. They taught them to grow corn so they wouldn’t starve to death, since the Pilgrims barely brought enough to eat for the journey over (big surprise). Some researchers say that if indeed the first thanksgiving feast even took place, the Native Americans supplied most of the food because the Pilgrims ran out.

How embarrassing. Who invites people over for a party, runs out of food, then makes the guests bring their own? That’s just bad manners.

If we want to talk about bad manners, though, maybe we should talk about how the Pilgrims repaid the natives for all of their kindness. Surely no good deed goes without some compensation, right?

The Pilgrims left their new friends with some lovely parting gifts, such as smallpox, and other life-threatening epidemics that eventually wiped out 90 to 96 percent of the Native American population. From time to time, they would rob Native American villages when they needed supplies, and dig up their graves to steal the offerings that had been buried with the deceased. Classy!

White settlers didn’t mind the Native Americans being around at first, as long as they could steal land, resources, and ideas from them. But as soon as their towns, and later, their colonies, began to flourish, they began to resent the natives.

They began to refer to them as “savages” and claimed that they needed to be “purified” (i.e. turned Christian). The whites began to force their religion upon many of the Native Americans who were still alive and healthy. For the rest, they just waited for the smallpox to kill them.

Sure, the Pilgrims could not have known that they were spreading disease, but they didn’t have to be so pleased about it. When the whites realized what was happening to the natives, King James actually said that he thanked “almighty God in his great goodness and bounty towards us for sending this wonderful plague among the savages.”

If the first Thanksgiving even happened, the only thing the Pilgrims gave “thanks” for was the fact that they could mooch off of the Native Americans and get away with it.

As far as “giving” goes, all the whites gave the natives in return was some crappy land out in the middle of a desert called a “reservation.”

Let’s face it, the holiday is a joke. The Native Americans were the gracious, hospitable ones, not us. We were too busy snickering as we handed them smallpox-infested blankets and saying, “here, these’ll keep ya warm!” to give them the thanks they truly deserved.