The intellectual elite who fetishize the tragic stories of marginalized groups in America are less interested in redressing those sufferings than they are in using them to maintain their membership in an elite group that is far removed from the plight of the “Other” (as they might say).

After a quick search of my email history, I discovered that it was about 5 years ago when people who work in universities began commonly listing their preferred personal pronouns in email communications and syllabi, a trend which has now rapidly spread across the corporate world and social media.

While the stated purpose of explicitly naming one’s pronouns is to foster inclusion and tolerance, the practice actually performs two unstated functions. The first is to compel compliance from those who might not be willing to cooperate with the increasingly complicated lexicon that grows out of the pronoun wars. The paper trail generated through daily institutional interaction (which frequently indicates preferred pronouns) is used to force dissidents to comply. If you “misgendered” someone and that person wishes to file a formal complaint with the Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, it is a great boon for their case if they can prove you were aware of their preferred pronouns by showing email communications where they made their preferences clear to you.

The second unstated purpose of listing one’s pronouns is to signify one’s membership in the priestly castes of university life: those intellectuals who, by mastering a complex vocabulary that eludes the grasp of regular people, demonstrate their superior respect for human dignity and their deeper concern for the many marginalized communities in the racist, fascist, homophobic, xenophobic, misogynous hellscape some people still insist on calling “America.” The ways that this group indicates their status among the clerics of social justice often parallels the performative aspects of religious sacraments. Naming pronouns when introducing oneself takes on a formalized, ritualistic character that is akin to making the sign of the cross at the end of a prayer. It serves to signal one’s profound devotion to a particular way of understanding the world.

Recently, though, the growing banality of naming pronoun preferences has created a problem for the clerisy of academic wokeness: once everyone is identifying their pronouns, doing so can no longer demonstrate your moral and intellectual superiority. Put differently, the common people – non-academics who really don’t have the critical-theoretical perspective to understand the catechisms of the cult to which they unwittingly claim to belong – have stripped away the means by which the true believers of the intelligentsia established their status among the elite. Thus, a new strategy for indicating one’s membership in the priestly class had to be devised.

That new strategy has now arrived on most college campuses, so you can expect to encounter it in Nike’s advertising before too long. Imported from countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, where Postcolonial Theory is more prominent than in the US, Weapon X in the rhetorical arms race that pervades academic wokeness has reached American shores: it is called the “Land Acknowledgement Statement.” As was the case with preferred pronouns, examples are most commonly found in formal textual documents that circulate within institutional contexts. Needless to say (to borrow some vocabulary from the woke themselves), the Land Acknowledgement Statements are rather “problematic.”

So, what is a Land Acknowledgement Statement? According to the University of Connecticut’s website, it is “a formal statement that recognizes and respects Native peoples as traditional stewards of lands. The statement highlights the enduring relationship between Native peoples and their traditional territories.” Generally speaking, these statements consist of a few sentences, placed at the top of a university syllabus or read at the beginning of an academic presentation, which “acknowledge” that the land on which the institution sits was once in possession of Native American people, of one tribe or another.

Some examples of these statements are in order, then.

At Queens University, a syllabus for Psychology 251 (Developmental Psychology) begins “Let us acknowledge that Queen’s [University] is situated on traditional Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territory. We are grateful to be able to live, learn and play on these lands. To acknowledge this traditional territory is to recognize its longer history, one predating the establishment of the earliest European colonies. It is also to acknowledge this territory’s significance for the Indigenous Peoples who lived, and continue to live, upon it and whose practices and spiritualities were tied to the land and continue to develop in relationship to the territory and its other inhabitants today.”

At the University of Texas, an Assistant Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion invited all faculty to include the following statement on their Engineering (!) syllabi: “I/we would like to acknowledge that we are meeting on Indigenous land. Moreover, I/we would like to acknowledge and pay our respects to the Carrizo & Comecrudo, Coahuiltecan, Caddo, Tonkawa, Comanche, Lipan Apache, Alabama-Coushatta, Kickapoo, Tigua Pueblo, and all the American Indian and Indigenous Peoples and communities who have been or have become a part of these lands and territories in Texas, here on Turtle Island.” While the inclusion of the statement remains a “suggestion” for faculty, opting out of such a suggestion from a Dean would certainly raise some eyebrows at any public university today.

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