By Michael Smith – Reflective MVS
Thanksgiving weekend in America:
The myth says “gratitude and togetherness.”
The calendar says “Black Friday and Cyber Monday.”
The group chats say “we broke, we tired, and we mad as hell at these corporations.”
Layered on top of all that is a quiet tug-of-war over whose version of America is allowed to be true. On one side, you’ve got the 1619 Project – a body of work that says flat out: the United States as we know it is built on slavery, anti-Black racism, and the genius and labor of Black people, so our story needs to start there, not at some sanitized Plymouth Rock pageant. (If you haven’t tapped in yet, start with the essays and curriculum at the 1619 Project.)
On the other side, you’ve got Trump-era “patriotic education,” 1776-Commission energy, executive orders trying to bully museums and schools out of talking honestly about race, and politicians launching investigations into any classroom brave enough to assign something that smells like 1619.
And into that battle strolls Thanksgiving weekend 2025, where a growing coalition is saying, “Cool story about freedom, but We Ain’t Buying It”—literally and figuratively. (Yes, that’s an actual economic pressure campaign: We Ain’t Buying It.)
This isn’t just a holiday. It’s a live referendum on history, power, and where our money sleeps at night.
1619: The Story Under the Story
Let’s start here:
Thanksgiving, as this country tells it, is a warm little painting of Pilgrims and Native people sharing a meal in 1621. No mention that Indigenous nations were facing mass death, land theft, and betrayal on repeat. No mention that Africans had already been enslaved in Virginia two years earlier, in 1619, when a ship carrying kidnapped Africans arrived in what the textbooks once politely called “the New World.”
The 1619 Project said the quiet part out loud: if you’re going to tell the story of America, you cannot start with freedom-loving Pilgrims and skip past the people bought and sold to build their dream. It reframes the nation’s origin story by centering slavery’s legacy and Black contributions as foundational, not a tragic side plot.
Conservatives lost their minds. Not because the project whispered some wild conspiracy, but because it dared to say:
- Your beloved origin myth is incomplete.
- Your institutions, from capitalism to policing to housing, sit on slave-built foundations.
- Your democracy has never been race-neutral, and pretending otherwise is part of the scam.
The backlash was swift. A whole “1776” counter-project rolled out as a patriotic rebuttal. Trump tried to drag museums and cultural institutions into line. States started targeting teachers, books, and school districts that dared to assign anything that looked like it might give students an accurate picture of race and power.
So when I say Thanksgiving is political, I’m not talking about your uncle’s Facebook rants. I’m talking about a government that wants you to eat this meal on stolen land and pretend the story started at Plymouth Rock instead of in the hold of a ship.
“We Ain’t Buying It”: When 1619 Shows Up at the Cash Register
While they’re busy trying to ban history in the classroom, a different kind of lesson is happening at the mall.
This Thanksgiving weekend, activists across the country are calling for a boycott of major corporations—Amazon, Target, and Home Depot in particular—as part of the We Ain’t Buying It campaign (weaintbuyingit.com).
The coalition behind it includes groups like Black Voters Matter, No Kings Alliance, Indivisible, and others that are very clear about the assignment:
- These companies have poured money and support into politicians and policies aligned with Trump’s authoritarian, anti-democratic agenda.
- We are not obligated to keep feeding corporations that bankroll our oppression, then sell us discount TVs as a consolation prize.
- From Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, people are being asked to hit pause on shopping at these giants and redirect their money to local businesses or simply not spend at all.
On paper, it looks like a boycott. In reality, it’s 1619 at the cash register.
The same country that doesn’t want our kids to read about slavery’s role in building American wealth still wants our holiday dollars to keep that system humming. The We Ain’t Buying It movement takes the logic of the 1619 Project and applies it to the economy:
If Black labor built this country, then Black spending can reshape it.
Thanksgiving as a History Test We Keep Failing
Every November, this country runs the same exam and flunks it:
- Do we acknowledge that this is Indigenous land?
- Do we connect the feast on the table to the stolen land, stolen labor, and stolen lives that made it possible?
- Do we see that the same forces trying to silence the 1619 Project are tied to the same corporate and political machinery being targeted by We Ain’t Buying It?
Look at the pattern.
The same circles that describe 1619 as “anti-American” and “brainwashing” are pushing sanitized “patriotic history,” trying to drag us back to a curriculum where Black people only appear as a problem, never as the architects. Meanwhile, activists organizing economic boycotts this holiday weekend are being painted as radicals for daring to say, “We don’t have to fund our own erasure.”
I wrote in The Budget is the Message: What Trump’s America Is Saying to Black People that a budget is a moral document. What you choose to fund is what you actually believe in, no matter what you tweet.
This boycott is a people’s budget moment. It’s the public saying:
If your money can fund cruelty, our money can fund resistance.
Black Thanksgiving: We Been “Not Buying It”
Black folks have been practicing a version of “We ain’t buying it” long before there was a URL or a hashtag.
We haven’t been buying:
- The lie that America was ever colorblind.
- The lie that capitalism will save us if we just work harder.
- The lie that Thanksgiving is just about gratitude, and not also about conquest, propaganda, and carefully curated amnesia.
Our grandmothers cooked for people who wouldn’t hire them for anything else. Our grandfathers worked union and non-union jobs, sometimes dodging both racism and the bosses who wanted them expendable. If you want a deeper dive on that legacy, read The Great Union Vanishing Act: How They Erased Black Workers from the Story and The Union Man: What My Grandfather Taught Me About Leadership and Justice.
We know what happens when we don’t organize our labor. Now we’re learning, on a bigger scale, what happens when we organize our spending.
The 1619 Project cracks open the story behind the story.
We Ain’t Buying It says: “OK, now that we see the story, let’s act like we learned something.”
What This Weekend Asks of Us
This Thanksgiving weekend is offering three invitations at once.
First, a truth-telling invitation.
If you’ve never engaged with the 1619 Project, start with one essay or one podcast episode. Let it rearrange how you see this country. Sit with how it feels to place slavery, not white freedom, at the center of the story. Notice who taught you to be uncomfortable with that.
Second, an economic invitation.
Ask yourself: where is my money sleeping tonight? Is it curled up under the blanket of a corporation that funds voter suppression and white nationalist-adjacent politics, or is it circulating in my community, my mutual aid networks, my local Black-owned businesses? The We Ain’t Buying It campaign is not just about five days of not shopping, it’s about building a habit of economic clarity.
Third, a courage invitation.
Courage doesn’t always look like marching. Sometimes it looks like telling your family, “I’m skipping Target and Amazon this weekend.” Sometimes it’s teaching a child that Thanksgiving is complicated, not cute. Sometimes it’s sharing one article that tells the truth, even when you know your cousin is going to roll his eyes in the group chat.
A Small Liturgical Moment for a Messy Holiday
If I had to write a Thanksgiving prayer that fits 1619 and We Ain’t Buying It, it would sound something like this:
Thank you for the people who told the truth when it was dangerous.
Thank you for the hands that cooked on stoves they did not own, for families who made feast days in shotgun houses and projects and trailers and cramped apartments.
Thank you for every elder who remembered a story this country tried to erase, and for every writer who put that memory in print.
Thank you for the power to say “no” at the checkout line, and “yes” to each other.
And while we’re passing plates, let us also pass around:
- Links to the history they banned and buried.
- Boycott info for the corporations that fund our erasure.
- Cash apps and mutual aid links for the people at our table who are one emergency away from crisis.
Gratitude without memory is costume.
Gratitude with memory, and action, is resistance.
Final Reflection
The fight over the 1619 Project is not just about what year we “started” as a country. It’s about who gets to be fully human in the story, and who gets written in as a prop. The fight around We Ain’t Buying It is not just about one weekend of shopping, it’s about whether our dollars will continue to underwrite the same old lies.
Thanksgiving 2025 sits right in the crosshairs.
You can eat the food, love your people, laugh loud, and still refuse the script. You can make a plate and make a choice:
- To honor Thanksgiving as a checkpoint, not a distraction.
- To treat the 1619 Project not as controversy, but as curriculum for your own unlearning.
- To treat We Ain’t Buying It as more than a hashtag, as a practice of saying:
- “My people built this country. My money doesn’t have to fund the people tearing it down.”
This weekend, let the turkey be dry if it must. Let the history be honest. Let the receipts be spiritual and financial.
And if America insists on pretending 1620 is where the story starts, we can smile, pass the mac and cheese, and quietly remind each other:
We know better.
We remember 1619.
And this year, we really ain’t buying it.
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