White Christmas
White Nationalism and a hollow holiday.
It did not feel like Christmas this year.
I thought it was personal. Self-deporting away from my family and loved ones in September to relocate to Uruguay, a country I have not seen in 25 years with my two English speaking teenagers would do that. There is a big cultural difference in the way Uruguayans do christmas and it goes beyond what I remember: Christmas in the summertime, fireworks, barbecues… This society, which is still largely non evangelical, doesn’t hyper focus on Jesus or consumerism. Families celebrate, exchange modest gifts and spend the summer days off from work in nature, mainly the beach.
State-side, my own family wasn’t up to celebrating considering that half of it had to make the tough choice to separate due to the political hostility of the USA and yet, we are a lucky family despite that — I was able to raise funds, say my goodbyes and create incredible projects and experiences before leaving on my own accord to a country that I was safe to come back to. That privilege has not been given to the people that are being disappeared, incarcerated in concentration camps and sent to countries they aren’t even from. According to google. by September 23rd of this year, the administration claimed that 2.5 million people had left the country through a combination of over 600,000 deportations and an estimated 1,900,000 self-deportations. While working for immigrant’s rights in the US during the first Trump administration I’ve done a fair share of direct support to families of undocumented people that were at that time detained or deported and can tell you that holidays are extremely painful for those families torn apart by incarcertation and deportation.
The cruelty is the point, but the irony cannot be lost — the party and the people that for years waged culture wars over “keeping Christ in Christmas” (and centered everywhere else in society) now as always, turn a blind eye to the teachings of Christ, the Palestinian migrant child that spent his time with the poor and outcast and demanded we treat the most vulnerable with the outmost care and respect as a sign of a covenant to him, then and only then can we mimic paradise on earth.
The veneer of America being a heaven is gone, no one “feels like it” this holiday season because christmas in the USA has always been tied to capitalism. When you are in an economy heading for a great depression and war and you have to choose between paying rent or buying gifts… you do not feel much like celebrating. You can’t get the cozy, family together vibes of christmas whilst your neighbors’ doors is being knocked down by ICE, you don’t feel much like consuming and when beloved celebrities mock you with Ai generated ads for terrible corporations and fascist aligned celebrities wash their hands off our blood through family friendly specials made to sanitize their image. I always wondered if people knew Coco Chanel was a nazi or if she was just a really good spy, and if people knew, why did her house stay in business to modernity, I wonder no more.
When you begin to understand that all of what’s happening now in your own streets has been happening to countless countries for years through US’s interventions you begin to see that the imperialist chickens came to roost. Their ultimate goal was always to subjugate workers across the world, including the US itself. When you see concentration camps being built over affordable housing, know that they are to keep US citizens in too. When you see war machines on foreign nation’s streets and bombings on Christmas days with little to no explanation know they’ve done that in Philadelphia alredy to Black People.
Today the ultra right has won half of Latin America thanks to the US’s exporting these evangelical grifters with prosperity gospels, podcast bros peddling incel content and misinformation via social media and other mass media monopolies owned by billionaires and outright buying countries and their elections.
So this Christmas, instead of fireworks we see the president of the USA once again engaging in war theater, inching us closer to the thing that hangs over our heads being named clearly in the state controlled media (owned of course by the very president’s most powerful friends) that we are at a world war. That we have no time left to try and save the planet from ecological collapse. We are horrified every day with a barrage of information about how the wealthy are extracting every bit of what makes Earth precious from water to children for their profit and pleasure with no regard for a future.
And yet, people are still protesting and boycotting, buying angel trees and running soup kitchens and pushing for the last year donation goal for their favorite non profit. No matter how much the new algorithms try to suppress it, across the globe people continue to organize, support and love each other and make space for community. That’s the hope of the season. That we will relentlessly continue to connect and create the revolution.
Leonina Arismendi is an award winning Uruguayan artist, human rights advocate and environmental justice activist.
