by James A. Bacon
In the thought bubble of intersectional oppression, language mutates faster than COVID-19. It’s almost impossible for us normies to keep up. I consider it a point of professional pride to stay up to speed, but even I find it astonishing at how rapidly the woke mind virus is evolving.
Delving into the thinking of left-wing faculty at the University of Virginia introduced me to the idea of the United States as a product of “settler colonialism.” The ideology goes far beyond the assertion that European settlers in North America brought nothing but disease, war and dispossession of indigenous peoples. This strain of progressivism propagates a fairy-tale narrative that indigenous societies lived in concordance with progressives’ 21st-century fantasies.
As the oppression narrative has evolved, progressives now aim to “decolonize gender,” as part of a larger project of taking back power from the colonizers. That entails celebrating the “indigiqueer” of North American peoples who didn’t conform to Westerners’ gender binary. (Islamic conquerors imposed their gender binary upon indigenous societies of Africa, but progressives don’t lose much sleep over that.)
Yup, “indigiqueer” is now a word.
You can learn about it just by opening up your Microsoft Edge browser and viewing the algorithmically-driven news feed. This morning I was treated to, “What Does It Mean to ‘Decolonize’ Your Gender.”
I accept the idea that some indigenous societies had different ideas about gender. In Little Big Man, a 1970 movie starring Dustin Hoffman that highlighted the charlatanry and debauchery of White frontier society while romanticizing the life of the Plains Indians, an important secondary character was an effeminate male who took on a female role within Cheyenne society. Given how the movie was produced decades before the trans movement became a thing, I surmise that the role was based upon legitimate ethnographic reports.
But to depict indigenous societies as fairylands of gender justice is a bit too much. Indigenous societies warred with one another as frequently as European societies did. When given a chance, they slew the males and enslaved the women and children. Enslaved women were not treated as gender equals. They did the scut work of indigenous society. They were, to borrow the vocabulary of today, “oppressed.” But the history of indigenous slavery, enslavement, and slave-trading is whitewashed — or should I say “wokewashed”? — in progressives’ narratives.
The re-writing of history serves a modern-day purpose, of course, as the Decolonize-Your-Gender article makes clear.
From the movement for a free Palestine to the Puerto Rican crusade for independence to the push for Hawaiian sovereignty, taking back land and ancestral knowledge lies at the root of decolonial struggle. For Land Back, the decentralized movement for the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples, decolonization means “the reclamation of everything stolen from the original peoples: land, language, ceremony, food, education, housing, healthcare, governance, medicines, kinship.”
Only America’s pampered educated elites could advocate returning to the lifestyles and living standards of 15th-century, pre-Columbian society. Someone should survey America’s five million or so indigenous peoples to find out if that’s something they aspire to. I expect the overwhelming majority would just like to restore the dream — dare I call it the American dream? — of building a better life for themselves free from busybodies telling them what that life should be.
Dwelling upon and demanding restitution for ancient wrongs is a dead end. Sorry, descendants of slaves and indigenous peoples, no reparations for you. Sorry, descendants of Confederates whose homes and farms were destroyed in the Civil War, none for you either. Sorry, Southerners of all races immiserated by Northern tariff and banking policies. Sorry, farmers crucified on the cross of the gold standard. Sorry, coal miners and factory workers who labored in hellish conditions. The past is past. We are powerless to undo the wrongs done to, and inflicted by, our forebears.
Our goal should be forward looking: to maximize liberty; provide security, opportunity and uplift to all Americans; find and fix the flaws in our institutions; and adapt to the world’s ever-changing economic, technological, environmental, and threat conditions. If we can’t forgive and forget ancient grievances, we’ll find it impossible to build a better society today.