My dears, as much as I do sincerely wish you a merry Christmas, today I need to share a holiday memory that is twisting my heart with truth I didn’t see at the time. Forty-four years ago tonight was my very first Christmas, and it was a White Christmas indeed… but not because of snow, since it took place on a Caribbean island. What I see looking back is how it was part of shaping me as White in America.

My family is Jewish, so I didn’t have a Christmas until I was four, in 1976. That year my grandfather got some sort of bonus for spending his entire engineering career at GE, and he decided to take us all on vacation to an astonishingly beautiful island resort.

It was heaven. We snorkeled in warm crystal waters among rainbows of friendly tropical fish. My big sister won the sandcastle contest with her dragon armed in sea-grape-leaf scales and a forked coral tongue. A sparkling ice sculpture of a clipper ship sailed above the nightly beachside buffet where my parents and grandparents were very excited to see some people they said were named Mel Brooks and Alan Alda.

And then it was Christmas, and it got even better. They loaded up the buffet tables with sugar cookies, right there for the taking and exactly at my eye level. At dusk, the steel band struck up, and its rollicking renditions of classic carols seemed to be calling across the bay to a lone yacht moving towards us, its rigging strung with twinkle lights. As the boat drew closer, it turned out to contain Santa! He jumped ashore at the private dock and I joined the line of children for the one and only time in my life that I’ve ever sat on Santa’s lap. It was absolute magic.

And now I’m afraid that you’ll roll your eyes at my “PC” retelling of what was obviously a wonderful memory, but this truth matters to me: We were celebrating in the ruins of a death camp.

At the time, the hotel was called Caneel Bay Plantation. At some point, that last word got changed to Resort, since the clear association with slavery isn’t exactly geared to sell room reservations these days; and in fact the place is closed down now anyway, in the aftermath of 2017’s Hurricane Maria. The owners are feuding with the government about whether they’ll get to continue their uniquely profitable deal to extract wealth from National Park lands, and they’re holding the local economy hostage by refusing to pay for repairs and clean up hazardous waste until their investments are guaranteed.

But “Plantation” was the literal truth. My favorite lunch spot on the property was called the Sugar Mill, an open-air space surrounded by picturesquely toppled stone walls where I would stare at the tumbled blocks of the central chimney and wonder endlessly how they fell. My imaginings centered on princesses and ogres. I certainly never came close to the truth, which was that the family of enslavers who owned the plantation let it lapse into disrepair when in 1848 the Danish colonial government ended slavery on the island, making it unprofitable to operate.

The descendants of those enslaved Africans were still there, along with those fallen stones; they were the hotel staff who doted on me and my sister, enchanting us with their lilting accents. We never thought to wonder what had become of the truly original inhabitants, the Taino Indians who left behind the petroglyph that became the resort’s logo, sold on everything from glassware to jewelry to the fabric my talented mom shipped home and carefully sewed into the matchy-matchy family outfits we’re wearing in the attached ultimate-1970s photo.

I mean, of course I didn’t question the situation or know the history — I was four! I’m not feeling guilty for not knowing that this fantasyland was built on realities of colonization and enslavement, the theft of land and lives. And I’m not faulting my parents or grandparents, either. Yes, any one of us could have awoken earlier to these hidden-from-us truths, and I’m not excusing that, but individual guilt is not the point.

What I’m trying to make clear, to myself and to you if you’ve read this far, is that this is exactly how nice folks like me and my family get trained and taught to be part of White supremacy culture.

We can’t dismiss facts as “ancient history” that just doesn’t matter, and we can’t shrug off ignorance as simply “Americans don’t know history,” when we are living in a culture that clearly prides itself on the history we are picking and choosing to celebrate! That hotel used an ancient Indigenous symbol as its logo, named its restaurant for the forced labor camp that it had been in the 1840s, and lavished praises upon the ultra-rich American who purchased most of the island in the 1950s to found the hotel and the National Park surrounding it. That hotel took the legacy of colonization and enslavement and glorified it into paradise.

Being a child there, imbibing that worldview along with my no-booze Pina Coladas, soaking it up with the tropical sunshine, is part of what shaped me. Gave me the pleasantest associations with the word Plantation, taught me to smile at the idea of a colonial sugar mill as the place where I danced with my grampa. It took me more than forty years to even begin to think about re-examining those assumptions and reactions. Early training goes deep, you know?

And that’s why I sit here today, trying to relearn what’s really true, trying to recalibrate my emotions to reconnect with the horror that by rights we as humans ought to feel when treading the ground where generations of our fellow human beings were tortured, raped, and murdered for profit. My grandparents would never have brought us to celebrate Chanukah at Auschwitz, for instance. Hell, they would never have brought us to Germany at all; the whole country was eternally suspect, permanently poisoned as far as they were concerned. So why was this resort different?

Because that’s the nature of Whiteness in America, to know and not know at the same time by detaching our hearts and minds from the humanity that should scream truth to us from our sanitized stories of the past. After all, it ain’t like my Jewish granddad plotted to spend his Christmas bonus indoctrinating me into White supremacy culture. It just… happened. It got passed along automatically, reinforced by everything around us.

I don’t have prescriptions for what should happen with this resort, or what they should have done differently back in the day when I was there. Is it best for the local folks who depend on tourism if the place reopens to continue offering a white-washed white-sand paradise to wealthy primarily White people? Is there an alternative where the history is appropriately honored and the ever-present joy and beauty of the island can still be celebrated and preserved? It’s not for me to say; I’ll leave that to the people of the island whose lives are directly tied to these questions. My job right now is just to start understanding that questions like this even exist, after a lifetime of far too much accepting without question.

As always, hoping that sharing my process of re-learning about race, racism and Whiteness is useful to you in some way. Kind of a dark Christmas gift to offer you today, but it’s what I’ve got.

Wishing you the healthiest and happiest possible holidays, my friends. Thanks for reading. ❤