Although John McWhorter may have been taken on board the New York Times as a reliably “heterodox” columnist (remember his bestselling critique of wokeism Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America?), he occasionally comes up with something that’s pretty woke in itself. One example is his recent article favoring land acknowledgments. Click below to read it if you subscribe, or find the piece archived here.
McWhorter is a smart and thoughtful man, and I wouldn’t dare accuse him of producing pieces like this just to keep his job. But my “J’accuse” here is the weakness of his argument and his tendency to leave out counterarguments. As you’ll see, his primary argument for giving land acknowledgments is because it “feels to him like the right thing to do.” He gives a few other benefits of these acknowledgments, but doesn’t talk about the problems, including the fact that many indigenous North Americans oppose acknowledgments and the issue of exactly who displaced who is often a problematic historical question.
Note that McWhorter says in the title below that land acknowledgments are both woke and right, but it was McWhorter himself who turned “woke” into a pejorative word, meaning (in my view) “something that purports to effect social justice but doesn’t do so, being largely performative.” His whole book, in fact, is an argument against the “woke” nature of much antiracism, including that of Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Is McWhorter now trying to reverse the meaning he gave to the term? (Note that “woke” originally was not pejorative but denoted awareness of racism and bigotry.)
Now I have no objection to land acknowledgments if they’re just meant to teach history, but you know very well that this is not their purpose. Their main purpose is to expiate the guilt of people who see themselves as “displacers”. It is generally a performative exercise that accomplishes nothing and can, as noted below, even be counterproductive, reducing interest in indigenous cultures. Many of the people who have to suffer through these exercises had no part in the oppression of Native Americans but are cast as oppressors anyway. (My ancestors, for example, were in Eastern Europe fighting off Jew haters, and didn’t arrive in America until the early 20th century.)
But let me quote McWhorter, who deals briefly with the “performative” stuff and dispels it by saying that “some response is better than none”:
. . . . I think the land acknowledgments are wonderful.
Statements often also say that the original inhabitants were parted from their land by treachery, violence and European disease, and also note that their descendants survive and remain stewards of the land.
Events at Yale University, for example, sometimes begin with this acknowledgment:
“Yale University acknowledges that Indigenous peoples and nations, including Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian speaking peoples, have stewarded through generations the lands and waterways of what is now the state of Connecticut. We honor and respect the enduring relationship that exists between these peoples and nations and this land.”
As for the performative aspect, McWhorter says this:
Many find these acknowledgments an inauthentic way of genuflecting to injustice without having to actually do anything about it. But institutions often treat the acknowledgments as one of many strategies for supporting the local Indigenous groups. Yale now grants a certificate in Native American and Indigenous studies. Its joint project with N.Y.U. supports Native American tribal sovereignty through legal advocacy and educational initiatives.
Yet obviously any efforts can repair only partly. Most of the descendants of the Lenape who originally inhabited Manhattan now live in Oklahoma and Wisconsin (and Ontario), their ancestors having been forcibly relocated there by whites in the 1800s.
But some response is better than none, and to sneer at land acknowledgments as performative nonsense is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
People often put land acknowledgments in the same basket as calling the soft bigotry of low expectations “D.E.I.” and calling for the defunding of the police. But trashing land acknowledgments because of these other woke shibboleths is like dismissing paved roads because the Romans built them but also espoused slavery, sexism and violence as spectacle. “Look at what the Romans were like — no aqueducts for me!”
This is a bogus argument: land acknowledgments do not improve society the way paved roads do. In the vast majority of cases, organizations who deliver the land acknowledgments (henceforth “LAs”) do not do anything to help the displaced peoples: they do not give money as reparations, return the land, or otherwise help the displaced people (more later on “displacement”).
McWhorter does give a couple of examples of nonperformative LAs. This one, involving bigotry decades ago, has little force:
My grandmother was a seamstress for a rich white family that would give their staff a luscious rustic week each summer on their island in Maine. She brought my family along in the summer of 1975. You could drink the lake water, it was so clean and clear. Dinner nightly was big lobsters. All you had to do was dip your rod in the water, and you’d be sure to pull up a bass. The cook made splendid blueberry pie with the local berries. The dogs were cute. In our “cottage,” there was for some reason not a piano but an organ; I loved learning how to work it.
The Polaroids of all of this just shine to this day with what a simple, unalloyed joy that week was. Except that late at night, I heard the white staff, always so warm and friendly around us, talking fiercely about the local Native Americans — I’m guessing they were the Passamaquoddy — as if they were less than human.
Apparently, the week in Maine is the equivalent of a land acknowledgment, but I’d rather have that and lobster dinners than empty words. And you can be sure that the staff were not Native Americans but African-Americans, and slavery and its sequelae are not the same thing as Native Americans displaced from their land.
McWhorter also cites, to his credit, something he did as reparations:
Later, I participated in a program helping restore Native Americans’ languages to them (Leanne Hinton’s pioneering Breath of Life). For one of the languages, a set of flash cards was one of the few records of its key words, and it had gone missing. The cards happened to turn up at my house, where one of the other assistants had accidentally left them after a gathering. When I gave them back to one of the group’s members, I will never forget her tears and the sincerity of her long hug. These people lost so much, and it still hurts.
There he put his money where his mouth is, but I have to say that giving back a pack of flash cards is not much reparations—not compared to giving back money or land.
But what does McWhorter leave out? Here are four issues:
Land acknowledgments can be detrimental. I mentioned that many people who deliver or hear LAs had no part in “stealing” land. He also leaves out that land acknowledgments can, on the whole, be detrimental. Here’s a paper this year in Nature Human Behavior showing how:
The abstract relates that LAs can make people aware of “local indigenous groups” but also reduce interest in the culture and heritage of such groups. The conclusion is that LAs are pretty performative, serving mostly to elevate the reputation of organizations that make them rather than effect social justice. They are, in a word, performative:
Land acknowledgements—formal statements recognizing Indigenous custodianship of land—are widespread in Australia, where they originated, and have been gaining traction in the USA. Proponents argue they raise awareness of Indigenous histories and build support for reparations, but causal evidence is limited. Here randomized experiments on non-Indigenous populations in Australia (N = 1,724) and the USA (N = 1,773) find that exposure to land acknowledgements increases awareness of local Indigenous groups but can reduce interest in Indigenous culture and heritage. We find no significant effects on a range of political attitudes, including collective guilt and support for reparations. Additional experiments (N = 3,638) suggest that the adoption of land acknowledgements provides small reputational benefits to institutions facing public scrutiny. Costlier practices—such as financial compensation and Indigenous participation in decision-making—have significantly larger effects. These findings suggest that land acknowledgements primarily improve organizational reputation rather than generate sociopolitical change.
Many indigenous people oppose land acknowledgments. Below the fold I’ve given what Grok told me (with references) when I decided to ask it if any indigenous people opposed LAs. Grok spat out a pretty long list, with indigenous people citing the performative nature of LAs as means of flaunting one’s virtue and expiating white guilt. LAs are also said to sometimes be historically inaccurate (see below), patronizing, and unable to provide “concrete benefits” for Native Americans. In the cases I’ve heard, the LAs are delivered by white people, descendants of immigrants who didn’t drive anybody off their lands.
McWhorter doesn’t mention this. He just says that some acknowledgment is better than none. The article above suggests that this isn’t correct, especially if the LAs are quickly forgotten, as they often are. In that case, what “good” is done except for the LA announcers feeling good about themselves?
The history of North America is complex, beginning 20,000 years ago when Asians crossed the Bering Strait to colonize America. They subsequently split into many different populations as they spread south and east. Those populations sometimes cohered within themselves as “tribes,” and there’s a long history of intertribal warfare among Native Americans, with tribes displacing other tribes from their land and killing off or assimilating them.
McWhorter doesn’t mention this, but the history is long, and very often a historically accurate LA would indict Native Americans tribes in sequence, valorizing only the last group that was displaced.
I’ll give two examples that can stand for many. First, the Comanche systematically forced the Apaches off “Apache land” (note that the concept of land ownership differed from what we have today); see here and here.
Likewise, the Lakota “were pushed onto the northern Great Plains during the seventeenth century by conflicts with the Anishinaabe and Cree; after adopting horse culture around 1730, they crossed the Missouri River and established themselves in the Black Hills by the 1770s as the spiritual center of their territory.” The moving and expanding Lakota then pushed out the Cheyenne “tribe” as well as other groups like the Crow and Kiowa. You’d need a very long acknowledgment to detail all this, and of course it would indict, along with white colonists, the Cree and the Lakota themselves. You can’t just give a performative LA indicting the present white “settlers,” for you’d be neglecting the nefarious conquests of the Lakota by the Cree and of the Cheyenne and Kiowa by the Lakota. Is only the last group guilty? This also makes the question of reparations intractable: would a modern member of the Lakota apologize for displacing the Cheyenne, and offer reparations?
And of course all of these displacements trace back to the original users of land: the descendants of the H. sapiens who crossed into North America 20,ooo years ago.
Land Acknowledgments that indict only modern white people involve a form of “race essentialism”. This was suggested by Greg, who said this to me in an email:
There is race-essentialism inherent in LA’s. Some particular people of various ethnic groups displaced other particular ethnic groups. You (Jerry) are guilty because you are white– none of your ancestors were here at the time of the Indian wars, but yet you are guilty, because some other white people defeated some Indians, and all Indians have the same essence.
The question of LA is thorny and tortuous, but none of these issues are raised by McWhorter. There are far more LAs given than real attempts to “atone” for displacement, and we all know that the vast bulk of LAs are performative. Yes, McWhorter can defend them as being “the right thing to do”, but if McWhorter is going to lecture white colonists on what is “right to do”, shouldn’t he also be lecturing the Lakota, the Cree, and dozens of other Native Americans groups who were “displacers”?
A war between tribes, taken from the video cited above:
[Addendum by Greg Mayer. Jerry and I were discussing this while he was composing his post, and he asked me to add some more thoughts, so here goes. The entire concept of indigenous is not at all straight forward. In biogeography, the word “indigenous”, as applied to plants or animals, has a relatively clear meaning– not transported to a place by man. (There are some terminological issues when dealing with recent natural dispersals.) But that doesn’t work for people– all people were brought by people! The term seems to mean “whoever was there when the first Europeans got there”. But why start “indigeneity” at that time point? Most places on Earth have been inhabited by people for a long time, and there have usually been numerous displacements, often by people who were culturally, linguistically, and ethnically distinct. What makes some of the later groups indigenous? About the only places that we know who the first people there were are remote islands that were discovered by Europeans (and the first inhabitants were thus those very Europeans, e.g., Bermuda), or which were discovered so recently that a relatively complete archeological record documents the history of occupation (e.g. much of Polynesia). We know the Sioux displaced the Crow, but we can be pretty sure the Crow had not lived there for 14,000 years, so who is indigenous?
Until the post-World War II settlement of the world order, the conquest and occupation of land was the main theme of human history. There were all sorts of laws and principles about these things, beyond brute force– What is a terra nullius? What is effective occupation? (the latter still sort of an issue in the Falklands). It was only after WWII that it was generally agreed that borders can’t be changed by force, but only by negotiated agreements. Thus Czechoslovakia split peacefully, but most of the world condemns the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.
Land acknowledgements in northern Italy would have to have the current Italians apologize to the Lombards (Germans), who would apologize for taking it from the Byzantines (who were legally Romans but mostly Greek), who would apologize for taking it from the Western Romans, who would apologize for taking it from the Celts (the preceding is a huge simplification). Beyond the Celts, the historical record is meager, but I’m sure the Celts got it from somebody else.]
Examples of indigenous people opposing land acknowledgments are given below the fold (click “continue reading”)
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