{"id":425960,"date":"2025-12-05T07:31:14","date_gmt":"2025-12-05T07:31:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/425960\/"},"modified":"2025-12-05T07:31:14","modified_gmt":"2025-12-05T07:31:14","slug":"sohum-sheth-it-was-never-just-about-land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/425960\/","title":{"rendered":"Sohum Sheth | It was never just about land"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this week, a guest column<\/a> confidently announced that Penn is \u201cnot on stolen land,\u201d because \u2014 wait for it \u2014 all land everywhere has been conquered at some point. Humans migrated! Tribes fought! Therefore, the phrase \u201cstolen land\u201d is unserious, and we should all just stop saying it. If this feels like a very convenient theory of history, that\u2019s because it is.<\/p>\n

The column states: \u201cConquest is a universal human story; it tells us how societies emerged, not whether they are capable of moral purpose.\u201d 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\u2019s about trying to force an institution that loves moral rhetoric<\/a> but hesitates on moral clarity<\/a> in its actions to say something uncomfortable out loud.<\/p>\n

Discomfort is the whole point. The serious argument behind \u201cstolen land\u201d has never been about identifying original ownership, but about modern, settler-engineered dispossession<\/a>: 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<\/a> by paperwork, legal deception, and other forms of quiet bureaucratic machinery. You don\u2019t 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 \u201ccivilized.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reducing the settlement of the Americas into \u201ceverything has always been conquered\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, disproportionate environmental pressures<\/a>, and life expectancies<\/a> 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. \u00a0<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, displacing Black families for the construction of the University City Science Center<\/a>, and reshaping West Philadelphia through the abstraction of \u201curban renewal.\u201d When you turn displacement into an administrative process, it doesn\u2019t quite feel like violence. This reality makes it hard for us today to recognize that same logic when considering Indigenous dispossession. The century might\u2019ve changed, but the underlying logic is the same.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 the nation\u2019s most prominent pro-slavery theorist in the early 19th century \u2014 and only removed a mural panel depicting enslaved people picking cotton after a Black staff member had to literally smash it<\/a> in 2016. Yale published the name change on its official website<\/a> with no mention of the years of protest efforts by students and staff that precipitated its action.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> adopts the same posture, using complexity as a shield when it obscures power and rejecting simple, honest language when it demands accountability.<\/p>\n

The irritation at phrases like \u201cstolen land\u201d 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 \u2014 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\u2019s bubble, systems are neutral, and the history you only experience through textbooks and TED Talks are always too complicated to mean anything actionable. It\u2019s a worldview that is profoundly incomplete.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cStolen land\u201d isn\u2019t an exercise of historical verdict; it\u2019s an alarm designed to interrupt the narratives powerful institutions and their privileged alumni tell themselves. Allow it to sting.<\/p>\n

The next time you hear a Penn admissions officer acknowledging the school\u2019s legacy of dispossession to a group of touring families, know they are not drawing attention to some \u201closers\u201d in the 10,000-year sweepstakes of human migration. They\u2019re normalizing honest conversations in a place that would otherwise perfect the art of deflection. If the words sound abrasive, that\u2019s intentional. Soft language has never forced a powerful institution to confront itself \u2014 and it never will.<\/p>\n

SOHUM SHETH <\/strong>is a College first year from Jacksonville, Fla. studying philosophy, politics, and economics. His email is sheth0@sas.upenn.edu<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earlier this week, a guest column confidently announced that Penn is \u201cnot on stolen land,\u201d because \u2014 wait…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":425961,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5132],"tags":[5229,1448,2830,1311,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-425960","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-pa","10":"tag-pennsylvania","11":"tag-philadelphia","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-united-states-of-america","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","16":"tag-us","17":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115665796029122491","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=425960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/425961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=425960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=425960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=425960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}