What Did An ASU Director Just Confess?

The Liberal Guilty Conscience

As I have reported before, ASU faculty meetings often begin with the ritualistic reading of a Native American Land Acknowledgement. ASU has a web page where you can read about this, and I will put the link below. It affirms:

“Arizona State University is located in Indian Country; there are 22 tribal nations in Arizona. The Tempe campus sits on the ancestral homelands of those American Indian tribes that have inhabited this place for centuries, including the Akimel O’odham (Pima) and Pee Posh (Maricopa) peoples.”

In itself, there is nothing controversial in that statement, and it is important that ASU affirms its commitment to serving all students. But these readings are usually a place for radical faculty to use the Native American Land Acknowledgement for their own purposes or to say something that the ASU statement does not say.

The one read before a recent faculty meeting included the claim that it was due to Native American care and keeping of these lands that allows us to be here today. It was at this point that the director inserted “despite the fact that we try and mess them up.” This seems like a very serious confession. I wasn’t sure who the “we” is but it seems to include the director. Is the director confessing to trying to “mess up” Native Americans or the land? Either way, has the “we” turned themselves in? What consequences will this “we” experience for their behavior?

This incident highlights how empty these readings are. If the professors reading these statements really believed in them, then they could sell their houses and give back their land. I recently had a conversation with Shelby Steele, and he correctly identified the purpose of these readings: the liberal’s own guilty conscience. It is all they can do to try and feel better about themselves. He said the liberals do these kinds of behaviors for themselves and have no actual proven record of helping the groups they claim to help.

This confession serves the purpose of a religious ritual for secular professors who have no way to deal with moral guilt in their own lives. They do penance by making statements. They teach about oppression and the oppressed. But they have no actual way of dealing with their own guilt. Their secular system has no redemption. As the Apostle Paul says in Ephesians 2:12, they are separated from Christ, having no hope and without God in the world.

In their system, the moral standard is about oppression. There are the oppressed and the oppressors. Because of this lens, they are not able to give a nuanced or fact-based reading of history. Whoever won a war is an oppressor, and whoever lost a war is oppressed. The West is the ultimate oppressor. Because many of these faculty benefit from the oppressors or are even part of the oppressive class, they must alleviate their own guilt somehow.

It is also materialistic. Oppressor and oppressed are analyzed in terms of material goods. There is no consideration of our highest good, which is not material. These professors do not deal with the highest good. In my experience, I have never heard one even define the good. And because of that, they cannot give us any final and consistent moral analysis of oppression and the oppressed.

This is one reason they teach the way they do. By teaching about oppressors, they are confessing to their own guilt and trying to change the next generation. It is also the reason they vote the way they do and engage in these kinds of secular rituals. They have no transcendent hope. What a bleak outlook: guilt but no ultimate redemption.

 https://americanindianaffairs.asu.edu/tribal%20relations/office-president.