Posted on November 23, 2017

Your Uncle at Thanksgiving

Anthony Bryan, American Renaissance, November 23, 2017

One feature of the cultural, intraracial war that defines our times is that white people must never enjoy a moment of unfettered self-satisfaction or celebration. Even a secular holiday like Thanksgiving, meant for gracious acknowledgement of our blessings, can’t be left alone. Just as Dr. Seuss created the Grinch as a Christmas villain, the Left has created “your uncle at Thanksgiving.”

This phrase refers to a certain kind of American liberals loathe. It is a rhetorical eye-roll at crude, unsophisticated white people who refuse to engage in self-hatred. It is mostly meant as a joke, but “your uncle at Thanksgiving” represents a deeper mentality that is worth exploring.

Why “uncle”? The word invokes the image of an older white man. He is white because non-whites never utter casual, generic put-downs of their relatives in public, while white liberals are eager to. It means an older white man who unapologetically states his conservative opinions. It’s the unapologetic part that galls anti-racist elites, for whom being sheepish is a way of life.

This uncle character shows up in popular culture in other guises, but always as a straw man for liberals to humiliate. He is Archie Bunker, the angry white male, the “non-college educated white voter,” or part of “Trump’s base.”

Around the dinner table, he embarrasses the family, not because of a criminal past or lurid personal life, but because he refuses to worship at the Church of White Guilt. The true believers cringe at the thought of being related to him and having to suffer through a meal with him. They just hope he doesn’t bring up “the blacks” while passing the sweet potatoes.

Of all the holidays, why Thanksgiving? This is the holiday most associated with families coming together — sometimes after traveling long distances — to enjoy a meal together. Grudges or antagonisms may fester in any family, but normal people look forward to reunions with seldom-seen relations. For anti-white warriors, this setting is just another target for their campaign against all positive portrayals of traditional white families. In the popular culture they control, the Normal Rockwell Thanksgiving has been replaced by cynical portrayals of discord and barely tolerated relatives.

Liberal disdain for this holiday also reflects geographic elitism. In the past, it wasn’t unusual for a promising young person to leave for college, get a degree and come home to be a doctor or lawyer or provide some other service to their community. The community was grateful and proud. Today, leaving a small town to go to a prestigious college is often a one-way street. After successfully absorbing lessons on the evils of “patriarchy” and “whiteness,” graduates typically go on to live in urban centers and think of their multicultural zip code as a badge of superior intellect and morality. They can look back at those who still live in their hometown and shake their heads with pity. At Thanksgiving, they must venture back to the benighted territories they thought they had escaped. They counter their family members’ expressions of earnest gratitude with sarcastic comments about “white privilege” or “Native Americans.”

While some cultures practice ancestor worship explicitly and most do it implicitly, modern Western culture actively denigrates previous generations and their traditions. This attitude is as poisonous as it is bizarre. So this Thanksgiving give extra thanks to your white ancestors who toiled and died to create the conditions for opportunity and comfort. Thank your fathers, brothers, cousins and yes, your uncles.