(no subject)

[feotakahari]

Hold up. Y'all hate landlords. You also want to give Native American land back. So if the Native Americans get back the land you're living in, wouldn't that make them the landlords you hate?

Comments

[random_thought_depository]

I guess it depends on the details of the arrangement. But yeah, every time I hear "land back" I really wonder what exactly the plan is. The obvious possibilities are:

1) Hundreds of millions of "settlers" are supposed to just voluntarily migrate back to Europe (and Africa, Asia, etc., or are only white people supposed to do this?). Obviously this is extremely implausible, but at least it's relatively nice.

2) Similar to 1), but instead of voluntary migration it's a continent-wide ethnic cleansing of unprecedented vastness (either forcibly deporting the "settlers" or killing them; I suspect the former would tend to shade into the latter if somehow this ever actually happened). This is if anything even less plausible than 1), so I'm not worried about this happening (there's no obvious source for the huge army of Stormtroopers that would be needed for this ethnic cleansing), but if it somehow actually happened it would be horrific.

3) The indigenous people "get the land back" in the sense that control of it is returned to them and they're de facto set up as a racialized ruling class, while the "settlers" are de facto reduced to second class citizenship. As with 2) this is extremely implausible (again, there's no obvious source for the huge army of Stormtroopers that would be needed to enforce this new order), so I'm not worried about this happening, but if it actually somehow happened it would be bad.

4) The "settlers" can stay and they still have full political rights and everything but they're just supposed to vaguely, like, cooperate in the restoration of indigenous sovereignty and listen to indigenous people when it comes to what to do with the land. On the good side this is relatively nice, on the not good side it's extremely vague and sounds like it basically works on the honor system.

5) I remember reading on far-lefty type saying that "land back" wasn't really something anyone expects to get but is advanced as a maximal position to be bargained down from in exchange for more realistic concessions and as a sort of moral statement. Which, yeah, I'm inclined to believe that because that's the use I'd have for that sort of rhetoric if I were inclined to use it.

6) By "give back the land" we actually mean something like "make the reservations bigger and more autonomous" or something. OK, I guess, but that's basically moderate reforms with radical slogans.

It's a lot like prison abolition or police abolition or anarchism in this way, my big objection to it is "What exactly is the plan here? Because many of the obvious possibilities I can think of are very idealistic and probably unworkable, bad, not actually as radical a change as you make it sound, or some combination of these things." And, like, I'm willing to believe that I'm just being uncharitable and there are actually people who've thought a lot about the details of how it's supposed to work, but if so that thought doesn't really seem to reach the discourse I'm exposed to.

[feotakahari]

What prompted this was a post denying #5: https://antifamoshe.tumblr.com/post/624478495818629121

[entanglingbriars]

I saw a meme saying it was unreasonable for white leftists to ask how "give back the land" will work when they clearly have no idea how the revolution and its aftermath will work but still call for it, but like... a huge reason I'm not calling for a revolution is I have no idea how it would work.