Barack Obama was the all-time champion of cynical, politically motivated Presidential “apologies.” It’s election time, though: the Democrats are in trouble, and clearly some bright propagandist assisting those faceless apparatchiks pulling poor Joe’s strings suggested that what the hell, it couldn’t hurt to have Biden grovelling to Native Americans right now.
It was a loud and angry grovel: Joe was shouting into the mic for some reason, telling the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona in part,
“The federal government has never, never formally apologized for what happened, until today. I formally apologize as president of the United States of America for what we did. I formally apologize. I have a solemn responsibility to be the first president to formally apologize to the Native people. It’s long, long, long overdue. Quite frankly, there’s no excuse this apology took 50 years to make….One of the most horrific chapters of the American history. We should be ashamed. The vast majority of Americans don’t know about it.”
Bite me. Biden probably didn’t know about it until he was told that he was making the speech. This was his first diplomatic visit to a tribal nation in his four-year term. Gee, what a coinkydink that it came right before an election! He should be ashamed to engage in such obvious pandering, but the shame threshold of his party is at an all-time high right now. Have you noticed?
Let’s look at everything wrong with this “apology”:
1. It is presentism, and presentism, condemning those of earlier eras for not having the benefit of the perspective, accumulated wisdom and ethical analysis of many years like their modern critics is unethical. The concept is the same as making adults issue apologies for “being bad” when they were children.
2. Native American boarding schools were active between 1819 and 1969. The children were taken from their parents and sent to schools operated by a collaboration between the government and some churches. The students were not allowed speak their language, dress in cultural clothing, or keep their hair long. The theory was benign: the European-Americans were taking over, and the decline of the Indian populations was inevitable. It was an effort to bring the Native Americans into the majority culture, as their sole options were to accept the cataclysmic changes facing them or to become a permanently marginalized and desperate sub-culture, fighting a doomed battle against forces they could not resist. In hindsight the policy looks brutal and cruel, but the American Presidents from James Monroe to Lyndon Johnson were not trying to be cruel. In fact, every one of them was smarter and more responsible than Joe Biden. They were just wrong, that’s all, like Joe Biden, indeed all of us, are about lots of things. Those Presidents accepted a flawed solution to a difficult problem. The Golden Rule should tell Biden that his apology is unethical. Watch President Trump apologize for Biden’s cut-and-run out of Afghanistan, just to annoy him.
3. “As time moved on, respect for tribal sovereignty evaporated. It was shattered!” Biden shouted. “Targeting children to cut their connections to their ancestors and their inheritances!” Oh, stuff a sock in it. The current state of the Native American tribes that have insisted on maintaining their cultures doesn’t indicate that there was a course that would have had a much better outcome. The Native Americans who are not in the legalized gambling business, a degrading occupation, are among the poorest American demographic groups. Had the tribes assimilated in the 19th Century, Native Americans would have more power, wealth, prestige and influence today instead of being reduced to victory laps over non-accomplishments like forcing the Washington Redskins to change its name.
4. Such apologies are cheap. They do not require genuine contrition or remorse, because the apology is issued by an individual who had no control over the conduct he is apologizing for. The list of past policies and actions the U.S. engaged in that appear wrong in the clarity of time (and after we have benefited from them) is endless: the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, Jim Crow, legal forced sterilization, lobotomizing the mentally and emotionally ill, the harassment and discrimination against gays—disco—and I’m sure Democrats will try to get votes by apologizing for all of them eventually. One of the most fervent apologies, if we’re grovelling for the mistakes of our ancestors, is due to women. They had no rights, they were turned into baby machines, they couldn’t vote or hold political office, and their choices of occupations were so restricted that a large proportion of those who didn’t marry had to become prostitutes. I’m sorry! (But I had nothing to do with any of it…)
5. Such apologies fertilize the metaphorical ground for, naturally, reparations. Progressives pretend to love them as much as they love apologizing. My family should pay Native American strangers for something we had nothing to do with that didn’t benefit us in any way. Seems fair!
6. The number of current cultural and societal fads and delusions that may eventually be ripe for future Presidents to score cheap political points by apologizing for them are legion. Racial, gender and ethnic discrimination (DEI). Anti-white propaganda in the public schools (Critical Race Theory). “Gender affirming care.” I can’t wait for the apology to the millions and million of unborn children who were killed in the womb because feminists insisted that they weren’t alive or human, just parasites, sort of like warts, really.
Biden’s apology is a minor transgression in the context of his disastrous Presidency, but no one should be deceived into thinking there was anything admirable about it.
Aside: As long as Joe is apologizing for things he couldn’t prevent, he should apologize to the ghost of Tony Williams, the superb soloist in the original Platters. In 1959, Williams’ career was permanently derailed after he was arrested for violating Ohio’s Jim Crow laws. He had committed the crime of hosting a white woman in his hotel room.
Ethics Alarms 
In hindsight the policy looks brutal and cruel, but the American Presidents from James Monroe to Lyndon Johnson were not trying to be cruel.
These schools were established during the Gilded Age, which were known for the lack of child labor laws.
The alternative to these schools was working twelve hours a day working at a factory, ranch, or farm.
Degrading though the gambling business (ultimately) is, the Gila River Casinos seem (as of my last visit to the Phoenix area) to be exacting their own sort of reparations from the white man.
More like revenge.
… a quarter at a time.
My church had a guest preacher once who thought she was edgy by asking if we were obligated as white Christians to lose money at Indian casinos. She thought that she was setting up this big moral dilemma involving gambling v reparations. When it came time for questions and she expected the outcry against gambling that she could characterize as outmoded and bigoted, I asked “Why do we have to gamble? Can’t we just by groceries?” The rest of the congregation immediately agreed that buying groceries was a better idea. We have a nice supermarket owned by a tribe and you pay taxes to the tribe on your groceries. She was really upset that she didn’t get to be morally outraged.
As long as Joe is apologizing for things he couldn’t prevent, he should apologize to the ghost of Tony Williams, the superb soloist in the original Platters. In 1959, Williams’ career was permanently derailed after he was arrested for violating Ohio’s Jim Crow laws. He had committed the crime of hosting a white woman in his hotel room.
Can you imagine that? He would likely go off-script and condemn everyone in the State of Ohio. Trump would love it.
-Jut
When I need a break from driving on I-10 between Phoenix and southern Arizona, I take the back way through Sacaton, the headquarters of the Gila River Indian Reservation. Indians don’t work at their casinos. The tribes just enter into deals with mob-controlled casino operators and take their contracted share of the profits after the other mob, er, the State of Arizona, takes its share. Nor do Indians work on the cotton and alfalfa farms on the reservation. They just lease reservation land, and the attendant water rights, to White Supremacist cotton farmers for cash. And now they live in newer, nicer homes. But they don’t really do anything. But by all means, everyone. Visit your local reservation. One I’d particularly recommend is The San Carlos Indian Reservation further up the Gila River that, as a character in one of my short stories notes, “makes Mexico look like Switzerland.”
I was wondering about this Presidential “apology” business. Is it a proper function of the President to issue “apologies”? For whom is the President authorized to speak when he issues an “apology”? Himself? The office of the President of the United States? The “federal government,” as Biden states? If so, by what authority? Congress?-I don’t think so. Certainly, Biden doesn’t have the authority to issue an “apology” on behalf of the people of the United States. So, what is the real significance and force of this curious “apology”?
In your Item 4- I did not know the federal government was responsible for -disco-? I thought it was the BeeGees!
Will Mr. Biden apologise to the Delaware tribe who were overpowered to establish the state he represented for five decades? Will he give back to the Delaware nation, the land upon?
Have the Democrats apologized to Japan for the US winning WWII yet? I know they were pushing for it.
Now, I am not so sure the Mexican-American War was wrong. One of the driving factors was that Mexico was not paying its bills to Americans. Mexico was an aristocratic society and the US wasn’t. So, when the US complained about Mexico not paying American merchants for goods they bought, the Mexican Gov’t reply was basically “Dogs will take the scraps they are given”. The US was not a well-established country yet (it wouldn’t be until after the Civil War). As a new country, you can’t let another country treat you like that. The US was no powerhouse. I think in Europe, Mexico was favored in the betting lines 6:1 or so. Mexico had a well-structured aristocratic society and Mexico’s army was larger and better organized (according to Europeans) than the US. Our military was tiny in comparison, and had to rely on the ‘rabble’ militias. In many ways, Mexico was the bully and the US was the underdog standing up for itself.
#4 as a matter of fact, at the time the wars were being agitated for, there were quite many people who believed the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American Wars were wrong. Here, I think Jack is backwards on this. In this case, hindsight has shown us that they were, indeed, good things for the country, and inevitably the world.
And ethics aren’t the same in geopolitical competition.
Oh, no question they were great for the US. But both were contrived. American lives on American soil! Remember the Maine!
And for the world. And frankly for the people who got “conquered”.
All true. But they were still unjust and contrived wars.
Did Mexican forces not shoot American soldiers who were operating north of the Rio Grande which was the treaty boundary between Texas and Mexico?
Maybe they did and maybe they didn’t. It was a fuzzy border. Polk “pounced,” and he pounced to take territory from Mexico. And did. He was never unclear that this was his intention.
5. …and reparations is nothing more than an indirect assault on our justice system. Heck, maybe it’s direct…I’m not sure. It’s a way to bring accusation against a bunch of people for a crime they didn’t commit, declare them guilty, and sentence them to punishment.
And you can bet reparations will be the loss leader in that campaign. If a person can be declared guilty of crimes against national ancestors, who were dead and gone two centuries before he/she lived?…a person can be declared guilty of ANYTHING.
As an aside, I wonder how many of those calling for reparations are Darwinists, believing that the stronger survive and the weaker die…or get pushed off the land they stole from someone weaker before them…who stole it from…
The Lakota people (many don’t like “Sioux”) are still miffed (and will tell you so) that they were driven out of Minnesota by other tribes. They passed along the favor when they moved into the Dakotas.
Now Joe (and you too, Jack…sorry 😉 ) can apologize for disrespecting all the other non-Indian Americans born here, and using the word “native” instead of “indigenous” for the people he was addressing. “Aboriginal” would have worked, too, but apparently that is now disfavored among the wokies as somehow evoking colonialism…or something.
<i>”Watch President Trump apologize for Biden’s cut-and-run out of Afghanistan, just to annoy him.”</i>
We do, as a matter of honor, owe many thousands of Afghanis apologies, who are currently being hunted and murdered for helping us when they hoped to establish a decent society for themselves with our help. Many many thousands more whose family members have been murdered for the same.