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”)
Here are examples of indigenous people opposing “land acknowledgments”: provided by Grok and given verbatim (sources are also provided):
Indigenous people who criticize or oppose land acknowledgments typically describe them as performative, empty, inaccurate, or counterproductive. Common complaints are that the statements require no real action (such as land return, resource sharing, or policy changes), relegate Indigenous people to a mythic past, misrepresent history or treaties, or function mainly as institutional virtue-signaling.
Here are specific examples:Brian Bahe (Tohono O’odham Nation; also Hopi and Navajo)Comedian and writer Brian Bahe has called the practice a performance of “White guilt” and said the trend needs to stop. In CNN commentary and stand-up, he satirizes corporate and Zoom-call versions (e.g., an HR director reading one from a large home with an indoor waterfall while on Lenape land) and notes that no land is actually returned. He has written satirical pieces for McSweeney’s mocking awkward or self-serving acknowledgments.
cnn.comHayden King (Anishinaabe, Beausoleil First Nation)King helped draft Ryerson University’s (now Toronto Metropolitan University) territorial acknowledgment in 2012 but later said he regrets it. He has argued that many acknowledgments are superficial, factually inaccurate (repeating nations under different names or misinterpreting treaties), and turn real treaty relationships into vague multicultural metaphors. In CBC interviews and other commentary, he has described them as a “reconciliation mime” that can obscure ongoing diplomacy between Indigenous nations and urged institutions to do substantive work with communities instead of reciting scripts.
Kevin Gover (Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma)The former director of the National Museum of the American Indian and Smithsonian undersecretary has said that hearing a typical acknowledgment feels like being told, “There used to be Indians here. But now they’re gone. Isn’t that a shame?” He has described the statements as potentially disempowering when they become routine and highlight absence without addressing present-day realities or sovereignty.
www-s4.npr.orgAssociation of Indigenous Anthropologists (including Valerie Lambert, Choctaw Nation, and Michael Lambert, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians)In 2021 the group asked the American Anthropological Association to pause land acknowledgments and related “welcoming” rituals at conferences. They argued there is no evidence the practice produces measurable change; many versions treat Indigenous peoples as past “stewards” or “custodians” rather than as nations with title and sovereignty; they can sanitize violent dispossession; and they function as “conscience-clearing rites” or feel-good gestures without follow-through such as land return. Michael Lambert has specifically criticized language that sounds like “thanks for taking care of the land so well—we promise to do better,” calling it a painful denial of forced removal.
Reid Walker (Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation)In a 2026 New York Times guest essay titled “I’m Native American. Land Acknowledgments Are Infuriating,” Walker argued that the modern institutional version often turns a recognition of dispossession into reassurance for the audience and stops exactly where it would cost the institution something. He quoted Apsáalooke artist Wendy Red Star: “The concept of territory is a completely Western idea. When we make land acknowledgments, we’re putting a Western, colonial concept on the relationship between the Native people who were stewards of the land. It’s not ownership.”
nytimes.comOther Canadian examples
- Claudette Commanda (Algonquin elder, Kitigan Zibi): Has said acknowledgments without readiness to return land amount to “scoring a brownie point on our Truth and Reconciliation Commission report card.”
cbc.ca- Devon Saulis (Tobique First Nation): Has described them as performative because institutions rarely follow words with action.
cbc.ca- Lynn Gehl (Algonquin Anishinaabe-kwe): Has called the widespread scripted versions “meaningless and patronizing.”
ctvnews.caThese critiques come from people with different political and cultural perspectives. Some reject the practice outright as useless or harmful; others accept a carefully done version in principle but say the dominant form fails the basic test of leading to concrete benefits for Indigenous nations and communities. Coverage in outlets such as CBC, CNN, the New York Times, and academic writing consistently reports this skepticism among a range of Indigenous scholars, artists, and leaders.
Esoteric “land acknowledgements” run all the way down —
A Collective Consciousness is necessary to sublate the marginalized, authenticated truth with dominating, hegemonic Centers of Power — and concomitant arrival of Unity Consciousness.
(Hegel has a lot to answer for….)
As a resident of British Columbia, which is at serious threat under the current government of being handed over to various and sundry bands exerting claims (over 297 currently awaiting “negotiation”), land acknowledgements are the thin tip of the wedge. They are required everywhere. Every government at every level, every sporting event, every school, every public ceremony is prefaced by a land acknowledgement. Whilst to most people these are simply performative and some kind of guilt expiating exercise (isn’t that what wokeism is at the end anyway), to others they are much, much more than that and form the basis of a serious legal acknowledgement that land has in fact been stolen and needs to be returned. The federal government signed an “agreement” (quote marks intentional because no one really knows what the implications are) in secret that turns over all of metro Vancouver to the Musqueam. what now then. The local hockey team Vancouver Canucks plays serious homage to native interests and has a lengthy land acknowledgement and usually some kind of drumming circle or other performance before every game really because the owners, big-time real estate developers, want to get the Musqueam Tseil-watuth Squamish band business, which is massive. A project in the wings will be the biggest residential land development project ever undertaken in Canada. All on land that has been given back, without any legal proof whatsoever that it was “stolen” in the first place, at no cost to the band but at tremendous cost to taxpayers now and for the future. So beware. Land acknowledgements seem at first blush to be nice things to do, but there are implications. People who count take them very seriously.
Thanks Alison! Yours is the comment I started to write before scrolling down. It’s never just a nod to “honor and respect [an] enduring relationship.” My cozy university encourages us to thank the four “host nations” with a nod to our own status as guests or visitors or settlers who have no inherent right to live and work where we do. At our Fall convocation a couple weeks ago, the land acknowledgement was followed by an incoherent address by a Squamish elder who gave what can only be described as personal religious testimony about her traditional Coast Salish faith. She encouraged the several thousand people in attendance to believe in a spiritual energy flow from the creator god in the sky that passes down through the tops of each of our heads, and she directly compared this energy flow to The Force that animated the lives of the Jedi knights long ago in a galaxy far, far away. No kidding, she really said this. Everyone left the convocation just a little stupider than when they arrived. It’s never just the land acknowledgement.
Perfect — “Everyone left just a little stupider than when they arrived”. That could be an epitaph for our age. Pair it with a riff on Clarke’s 3rd Law — “Sufficiently advanced ignorance is indistinguishable from stupidity” — and it’s hard to maintain optimism about our prospects
ISTM our overlay of rational conscious thought and planning on our great ape brains is just too thin to maintain the unprecedented scale, complexity, and pace of our civilisation. We Homo sapiens, who have been sapient enough to survive 300,000 years through various catastrophes, now seem on the verge of throwing it all away. I and my 20,000 or so generations of ancestors are not amused.
[Honestly, I did not set out to write such a bleak comment, but the Muse can be a harsh mistress.]
And leave not just a little stupider but also a little angrier, because of the historical complexities LA’s ignore.
You go to a meeting for a specific purpose only to have the first 5 minutes hi-jacked by something historically ignorant and guilt-imposing on people who (and whose parents and grandparents) have worked and saved to own their little suburban paradise: this is time stolen from people who wish to get on with the meeting and perhaps say something relevant to the meeting’s purpose.
Alison, thank you for describing this inevitability. Whether in Canada, the US, New Zealand, or wherever, the implication of land acknowledgments is as simple as, ‘We are not a legitimate country.’ So no one should be surprised when people move to disband said country.
At the risk of overcommenting, I have to add: around here the delegitimization is a constant thrum of “decolonization”, “Turtle Island”, and “so-called Canada”, until the conversation turns to the Orange Menace and his tariffs. Then it’s all talk about national sovereignty and standing on guard for thee. It’s paper-thin patriotism, but better than nothing from the lanyard class I guess.
DrBrydon @ 4 says “take it to court.” This long but even-handed essay explains why judges won’t save us.
https://northernbeat.ca/opinion/cowichan-rulings-a-relentless-legal-strategy-wins-landowners-lose/
I work in the legal field in a peripheral sense and I’ve participated in many land claim trials. I hesitate to call them trials anymore because they are not “really” trials. Thanks to Jody’s federal and Eby’s following directive, governments are not really allowed to mount any substantial defence. Trials are discouraged in favour of “negotiation” (quote marks used intentionally to signal the dubious nature of any negotiations). The government and the judiciary hold the blame of the situation Canadian taxpayers at all levels now find ourselves in. David Eby, the current (but hopefully not for long but then it remains to be seen if any subsequent government has the balls to make changes to this “reconciliation” bullshit) premier is a radical ideologue and much of what is going on in BC is at his urging. I don’t know what it’s going to take for this to stop. “This” being an almost complete capitulation to native demands and this elevation of nonsense like “knowledge keepers” and native mythology to some kind of superior level. it’s quite frightening.
Sorry, but unless you are willing to give back the land, to buy it, to pay back rent, to pay an ongoing share of revenues—in other words, unless you are willing to make reparations—land acknowledgments are nothing more than a form of performance art. Institutions that do nothing more than talk are, by definition, all talk.
Yes, it’s funny. It never seems to occur to people who do this that there might be a practical action they could take. (That bit Billie Ellish in the butt when she performed her land acknowledgement at the Grammy’s in February.) It’s just a thing they are supposed to say.
“It’s just a thing they are supposed to say.”
Yep.
I sort of agree Norman – in many places one can criticize the land acknowledgement as unserious hypocrisy. But in BC the current provincial government is not just willing but super keen to give back the land. Lots and lots of it. Including private property owned by individuals (not the provincial government). We can’t just laugh at these folks and ridicule their insincerity. See Alison @ 2.
And in no way does performative crapola expiate anyone’s guilt. Forgive the wordnerd pedantry, but here’s a dictionary definition and etymology:
I consider land acknowledgements to be yet another corrosive that Progressives use to try to delegitimize our current society. (You never see them banging on about the Norman’s dispossessing the Anglo-Saxons.) If any tribe has a valid claim, take it to court. There are limits to what we can do to undo the past.
In particular, the point about “delegitimize” (which is 100% accurate) illustrates the nature of Dialectic —
A cynical activism — concealed as innocuous good intentions — formulated in Dialectic intends to provoke or elicit a reaction that perpetuates the Dialectic.
IMHO It’s akin the call-and-response in music – but in thought / epistemology.
… Exhibit A (or “to wit” or whatever) :
“And so the dialectic continues.”
-Delgado and Stefancic
Critical Race Theory – An Introduction
2017 ed.
NYU Press
Let me know when the Zulus start land doing acknowledgments to the Ngwane tribe. Until that happens, this unidirectional, offensive farce will remain one more thing that I’ll lump into the category of “why Republicans keep winning in spite of everything that should otherwise cause them to melt into a puddle never to be heard from again”.
And where are all the demands for the Arabs to give back the lands they took from everyone else since the 7th century? Where all the land acknowledgements?
I think I’ll start, since I now identify as an Algerian Arab: I recognize that I live on land stolen from the Berbers! Allahu Akbar!
Saying a land acknowledgement requires having one’s head still attached to its body.
Yes, Jon. Many people are surprised to learn that white people arrived in South Africa about the same time the Bantus did from the north. (Both displacing the Bushmen/Khaosan. (sp))
If you see the world through racial glasses, you’ll see white-oppressor vs black oppressed, especially if you are determined to. Which somehow flies even 30 years after Apartheid.
best,
D.A.
NYC
Outside of parts of sub-Saharan Africa, all land is stolen land. Human are an invasive species everywhere else; the original “owners” weren’t humans. Does kudzu give land acknowledgements?
This week on Plant Wars!
Kudzu (Pueraria montana) vs. Japanese Knotweed (Reynoutria japonica)
Ha ha!
End-game revealed.
How do supporters of “land acknowledgements” square this with any support for mass migration?
Something of a contradiction.
Yeah, brings to mind the late 1960’s Chicano protests in California about the US government stealing their lands without acknowledging how they acquired the lands in the first place.
But there is the unaddressed inherent contradiction: i can’t steal my neighbor’s land today, but if my ancestor stole his ancestor’s a millennium ago, it would be copacetic. When and why is the transition from acceptable to non-acceptable?
[If it matters, none of us are/were named Norman.]
Unless some people want to get up during, say, Royal Canadian Astronomical Society meeting, right after the Land Acknowledgement, and say “I think these Land Acknowledgements are bullshit, here’s why: …” nothing will change. People are so docile that the thought of protest doesn’t cross their minds. If it did, they wouldn’t want the embarrassment of potentially being thrown out of the university grounds.
I asked Google AI to estimate what proportion of the land in the contiguous 48 states was occupied by the 1492 owners for less than 250 years prior to 1492. The answer was about 30-40%, including virtually all of the Great Plains.
In addition to the above arguments (the “indigenous” tribes credited for “owning” that land had usually stolen it from previous waves of migrants — just like everywhere else), we should also reject the claim that the “indigenous” peoples were good “stewards” of the land. Usually they did massive ecological damage (again, just like humans everywhere), limited only by the fact that their population densities were low.
… limited only by the fact that their population densities were low and by their lack of industrial strength technologies.
Absolutely. Slash-and-burn agriculture only takes you so far.
My Impression is that John McWhorter is a perfectly fine linguist. Devoting a column to any other topic seems silly.
Well, if we’re going to require opinion columnists to write only about disciplines in which they have specialized expertise, then opinion columns are largely going to disappear.
Also, some of McWhorter’s columns are actually good. For example, he has just published a column about whether a writer must have the “lived experience” of a character in order to write with a particular voice (e.g., can a white person write in the voice of a black character). He concludes that while the woke “lived experience” requirement is “presented as enlightenment, [it] is simply jejune. The literary world needs to get over it and get back to publishing writers for being the uniquely imaginative and empathetic humans they are”. Yes, please.
That column is more typical of his perspective than his misguided take on land acknowledgements.
You are kinder than I would be. I tend to skip op eds, and my description of “silly” was as much about this column here, not just McWhorter’s. I would be happy for them to disappear, since in the history of journalism op eds have been forms of pandering to readers’ biases without the expectation of accuracy and reliability. McWhorter’s views about “lived experience” and the written “voice” are another example of such fundamentally simplistic (I hesitate to call them) insights that I wonder who reads those things?
Yes! I thought I had mentioned that column but apparently did not. As someone demonized as white while trying to write about India, I thought that piece was great. I will write about it tomorrow.
Good you didn’t call him a cunning one.
Col. Angus would be offended that you considered it an insult.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l2oi-X8P38
He was quite the carpet bagger of the deep south!
I like John McWhorter a lot but I have to have a hard pass on this one. I hate L.A.s as all “identity politics”. I thought leftists were all about breaking down the walls, not building them up.
In Australia, I do know they’re very unpopular and seen by most Australians as deeply patronising to Aboriginal people who don’t even care about them. But what do I know? I don’t even live there.
D.A.
NYC
I do live in Oz and there seems to be a growing backlash against LAs here. At the last Anzac Day commemorations, a (part) Aboriginal man began giving a “Welcome to country” spiel at the Shrine of Remembrance which caused a bit of an uproar among some of the attendees. As I’m sure you’re aware, David, Anzac Day is the holiest day on the Australian calendar so for something like that to happen at such a solemn event was extraordinary. There were similar reactions at other dawn services around the country.
For American readers, it would be akin to the above happening during the changing of the guard at Arlington’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (something I could watch all. day. long).
BTW, I didn’t know LAs started here. I always assumed it started in the US and was transplanted here. FWIW, I apologise to the world for my country being responsible for starting this virtue signalling nonsense!
Many Australians say they resent being “welcomed” to their own country, especially those who were born and raised here.
I know I do😡. And AFAIC, for those who weren’t born here but are citizens, they’ve just as much claim to this country as anyone else.
Of course I’m excluding those fringe dipsticks who like to chant “Death to Australia”. That lot can drop dead. Or leave.
Woke W. White: “We would like to acknowledge that this property is actually stolen land!” (applause from crowd, pats self on back)
Indigenous Person: “Ok great, so when are you giving it back?”
Woke W. White: “Er, not doing that.”
Indigenous Person: “Ok, then are we getting cash?”
Woke W. White: “Uh sorry, no.”
Indigenous Person: “Then what about use of the property?”
Woke W. White: “Emmm like no…uh we would like consider that “trespassing” and immediately call the police if you just wandered on here…”
Indigenous Person: “Then what exactly is the point of acknowledging that you stole our land?!”
Woke W. White: “The point, my dear person of color, is to make US, not YOU, feel better about ourselves. You see, we want the benefits of the stolen land…AND the moral high ground at the same time. These “land acknowledgements” are the way we deal with that cognitive dissonance. It only works if everyone ignores the obvious speciousness of the entire exercise and is sufficiently cowed not to say anything.”
“So shut up! Or we’ll have you thrown off our, sorry…”your”, land!”
I am very disappointed with McWhorter. Land acknowledgements are so obviously idiotic. And unjustified by any rational argument.
News just in, the BC Conservative Party has just won the British Columbia provincial election, largely, I suspect, because of unease about the “land back” movement, DRIPA, and especially the Cowichan/Richmond legal case — all the kind of events downstream from land acknowledgements that show the nightmare of where they can lead. I very much hope they can sort it out, since unfortunately all parties to the left of them (any of which I would normally have voted for in preference) have abdicated all reasoning and responsibility on this subject.
Here’s my land acknowledgement:
Indigenous peoples held this land for 20,000 years and worked their way all the way up to the Mesolithic. Europeans arrived and 500 years later left footprints on the moon. It’s not my fault your warriors suck and retreated from Cape Cod to New Mexico before giving up. Deal with it