Isha Mehmood's Portfolio | Planet Blacksburg

Concentration:	Public Relations with a dual degree in Sociology, minor in Africana Studies, and a Marketing cognate
Hometown:	Blacksburg, Va.
Email:	isha@vt.edu
Interests:	Issues related to race, gender, or those pertaining to social inequality; Travel and culture; Art [in all of its various forms]
Clubs and Jobs:	Theta Nu Xi Multicultural Sorority, Inc., Caribbean Students Organization (CaribSO), The Roanoke Times, Women's Center Volunteer, Undergraduate Diversity Research Grant Recipient, Mad Dog, Office Assistant in McBryde
Favorite Quotes:	"Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to do great things." -Denis Diderot "If you observe a really happy many, you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that had rolled under the radiator, striving for it as the goal itself. He will have become perfectly aware that he is happy in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours of each day." -W. Beran Wolfe
Resume:

A Different Meaning of Thanksgiving
By Isha Mehmood

            While most families were gathered around a dinner table laughing with relatives over turkey and pumpkin pie last Thursday, I found myself on a weathered brown couch in my apartment, drinking cheap boxed wine with friends and discussing the genocide of Native Americans.

            Yes, I am referring to Thanksgiving, which marks a commercialized celebration of folklore that blatantly ignores the brutal and bloody past of American history.

            We have been socialized as American children to desensitize ourselves from the actions of white ancestry in slavery, Japanese concentration camps and countless other past historical interactions. The history of Native Americans has been no different.

            With glorified stereotypes as mascots and small reservations in already less populated states, it becomes difficult to teach our children that “Indians” are not just a figment of our history that has since passed, like dinosaurs or discos in the 1970s. We take time out of our busy schedules to spend one day a year recognizing the one time we treated Native Americans as civilized people: during an extravagant feast where the Pilgrims and the Native Americans put aside their differences to celebrate a good harvest.

Read the article...