For most of my life, I’ve considered the 1620 arrival of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower as the primary origin story of the United States. I thought this for good reason. It was what I was taught in elementary school. Indeed, in the fifth grade, I played the part of William Bradford, the first governor of the Plymouth Colony, in a school drama. Though I don’t remember my lines, even then I knew we were celebrating more than thanksgiving. The month of November was an annual celebration of our white, English fore-bearers and our mythology about them.

Every Thanksgiving we would study that first celebratory meal between the Pilgrims and the Indians. We’d learn the Pilgrims had fled England in search of a land where they could worship God freely. We were told these English men and women – with a little help from some friendly Indians – were the founders of a superior way of life in a new world. Jonathan Winthrop, another Pilgrim, would famously describe that early colony as “a city upon a hill” and an example of righteousness for the whole world. This metaphor has been used ever since by everyone from JFK to Reagan to Obama. The Thanksgiving origin story is so central to our American narrative that most Americans know of the ship called the Mayflower.

Unfortunately, another ship – the White Lion – which landed in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619 was completely unknown to me until this past year. That was for an equally good reason. No one – in all my American history courses – ever mentioned it. Indeed, if not for the New York Times 1619 Project, I still wouldn’t know about the White Lion and its passengers. For generations of Americans, though the arrival of the White Lion was as momentous as that of the Mayflower, the significance of that ship has been obscured and its passengers unacknowledged.

The White Lion was the first recorded ship to disembark enslaved Africans on our shores. In the summer of 1619, the captain of that ship exchanged about 20 enslaved Africans for food and supplies. These men and women would be as pivotal to the American narrative as the men and women of the Mayflower. While the descendants of the Pilgrims would become known for their work ethic, it would be the descendants of the men and women of the White Lion who would do much of the work clearing land, plowing fields, harvesting crops and building the early European communities in North America.

The ironies abound when you compare the Mayflower and White Lion. As a child, we were taught of the bravery of the Pilgrims, who risked all on their two-month journey across the Atlantic. The Pilgrims were pictured huddled in the crowded hold of the Mayflower, praying for God’s protection. Tragically, five of the 107 passengers of the Mayflower died during that voyage. I know all of this because we’ve romanticized their journey and proclaimed their landing at Plymouth Rock as a moment of divine providence.

We were not taught about the resilience and courage of those first enslaved people, who watched as over half of the 350 men and women crammed onto the White Lion died during their three-month passage from Africa. Our textbooks had no pictures of men and women stacked like wood in the hold of the White Lion, praying for their own deaths. No one celebrated this example of human endurance. No one acknowledged the evils the White Lion represented.

The differences in our knowledge about these two ships is illustrative of so much about the trajectories of their passengers. We know enough about the passengers of the Mayflower that nearly 35 million Americans can trace their ancestry back to those first Pilgrims. We know their names, their occupations, the composition of their families and their successes and failures. For those first 20 enslaved black Americans, we know very little. We know only two names, none of their histories back in Africa, nothing about the families they left behind and little about the work they did to help our white ancestors survive and eventually thrive. We don’t know how many millions of Americans can trace their ancestry back to the White Lion, but statistically it is as likely as with the Mayflower.

The White Lion and the story of its passengers is as much an American origin story as that of the Mayflower. For the next 400 years, without the contributions of the descendants of the White Lion, the descendants of the Mayflower couldn’t have constructed their “city upon a hill.” While the Pilgrims may have extolled the benefits of hard work, much of the wealth of the United States was built on the scarred backs of the descendants of the White Lion, men and women who received none of those promised benefits. If there is any group of early Americans who deserve our thanks, it is the men and women of the White Lion. Yet generation after generation of white Americans have ignored or minimized their contributions. We hold no annual remembrances of their journey, survival and accomplishments.

There is good reason for this. White Americans have never wanted to admit that “the city upon a hill” has a checkered history. When it comes to human rights, our nation isn’t an example of a superior way of life or of righteousness for the whole world. Though the city upon the hill has always hidden its subterranean dungeons, where people of color were abused, tortured and killed, the rest of the world knows this uglier truth. The only people we continue to fool is ourselves. Four hundred years after the White Lion arrived, most of our schools still promote only one origin story – the one where the white people are the heroes.

In many ways, Thanksgiving isn’t about thanksgiving at all. It has always been a thinly disguised white supremacist narrative, one unrepentant for past atrocities, ungrateful for all of the many contributions of people of color and unwilling to compensate them for their unrewarded labor.

While I understand this blog is too long to read at your Thanksgiving dinner, I encourage you to take a moment at your celebration to say, “Today, four hundred years after the ship the While Lion brought the first 20 enslaved Africans to North America, I want to express my deepest gratitude to their descendants for their enormous contributions to the economic, social and political vitality of our nation.”

This is a gratitude long overdue.