Earlier this week, a guest column confidently announced that Penn is “not on stolen land,” because — wait for it — all land everywhere has been conquered at some point. Humans migrated! Tribes fought! Therefore, the phrase “stolen land” is unserious, and we should all just stop saying it. If this feels like a very convenient theory of history, that’s because it is.
The column states: “Conquest is a universal human story; it tells us how societies emerged, not whether they are capable of moral purpose.” No one is claiming the Lenape were the first or only people to set foot in the Delaware Valley. A land acknowledgement is not trying to reconstruct Paleolithic real estate norms. It’s about trying to force an institution that loves moral rhetoric but hesitates on moral clarity in its actions to say something uncomfortable out loud.
Discomfort is the whole point. The serious argument behind “stolen land” has never been about identifying original ownership, but about modern, settler-engineered dispossession: treaties deliberately broken, forced migrations, communities and livelihoods shattered. The Lenape were not pushed out in a great, highly visible war of conquest. They were subjugated by paperwork, legal deception, and other forms of quiet bureaucratic machinery. You don’t need a Ph.D. to see the difference between ancient population movement and a government that emerged only a couple centuries ago signing a treaty, violating it, and then congratulating itself for being “civilized.”
Reducing the settlement of the Americas into “everything has always been conquered” dissolves responsibility into a mist of historical inevitability. If everyone has been displaced since the dawn of time, then no displacer can be accountable for any wrong.
It was never about land in the literal sense. The point is not to hand over College Green tomorrow. Rather, it is to remind us that inequality today is not an abstract moral puzzle, but a material condition worth recognizing. Many Indigenous communities today are burdened with poorly funded schools, disproportionate environmental pressures, and life expectancies over a decade shorter than the national average. Indigenous dispossession created structural disadvantages that did not vanish when the frontier closed. Land acknowledgments do not adjudicate whose ancestors stood where first but gesture toward the legacies of removal that persist in shaping opportunity in the present.
This brings us to Penn. Penn is an expert in historical abstraction. It must be, otherwise the alternative is to face its very recent, documented role in bulldozing the Black Bottom, displacing Black families for the construction of the University City Science Center, and reshaping West Philadelphia through the abstraction of “urban renewal.” When you turn displacement into an administrative process, it doesn’t quite feel like violence. This reality makes it hard for us today to recognize that same logic when considering Indigenous dispossession. The century might’ve changed, but the underlying logic is the same.
For more proof that elite universities treat uncomfortable history contemptuously, look at Yale University. The school spent years defending one of its residential colleges being named after John C. Calhoun — the nation’s most prominent pro-slavery theorist in the early 19th century — and only removed a mural panel depicting enslaved people picking cotton after a Black staff member had to literally smash it in 2016. Yale published the name change on its official website with no mention of the years of protest efforts by students and staff that precipitated its action.
Institutions like Penn do not lead moral change. They get dragged into it, protest the entire way, and then retroactively congratulate themselves. The recent column adopts the same posture, using complexity as a shield when it obscures power and rejecting simple, honest language when it demands accountability.
The irritation at phrases like “stolen land” comes from insulation. When you grow up far from the communities harmed by dispossession, it is extremely easy to treat injustice as an intellectual game — something to be dissected, not felt. Complexities and nuance become a pastime, while rhetorical simplicity necessary for public moral recognition feels like somebody flipping over the board mid-game. The worldview of privilege is one in which suffering is far away from one’s bubble, systems are neutral, and the history you only experience through textbooks and TED Talks are always too complicated to mean anything actionable. It’s a worldview that is profoundly incomplete.
Without sharp rhetoric, the people most buffered from the consequences of injustice will graduate to take the reins of American business and government, gliding through life perceiving injustice as a mere intellectual problem. “Stolen land” isn’t an exercise of historical verdict; it’s an alarm designed to interrupt the narratives powerful institutions and their privileged alumni tell themselves. Allow it to sting.
The next time you hear a Penn admissions officer acknowledging the school’s legacy of dispossession to a group of touring families, know they are not drawing attention to some “losers” in the 10,000-year sweepstakes of human migration. They’re normalizing honest conversations in a place that would otherwise perfect the art of deflection. If the words sound abrasive, that’s intentional. Soft language has never forced a powerful institution to confront itself — and it never will.
SOHUM SHETH is a College first year from Jacksonville, Fla. studying philosophy, politics, and economics. His email is sheth0@sas.upenn.edu.