The old Sam Cooke R&B hit from 1960, Wonderful World, opens with the memorable lyric, “Don’t know much about history/Don’t know much biology.” Then it goes on to reassure listeners in the chorus that, despite such ignorance, the simple embrace of love will solve all problems and “what a wonderful world this would be.” The song should be the anthem of the modern intersectional Left, the wokester l’internationale.
With their embrace of biological illiteracy (claiming men can be women, and vice versa, just by saying so, all chromosomal evidence to the contrary), juvenile naivete (alleging utopia will come from a simple love ethic), and historical simple-mindedness (insisting the complex record of the past can be distilled into a simple tale of oppressors and oppressed), intersectional radicals make Cooke look like a political prophet. As a long-time practicing historian, it is the difficulties created by the woke twisting of the past that most interest me. Two recent events brought them into focus.
Rewriting History as Victims v. Victimizer
On a visit to Washington University in St. Louis a few months ago with my college-shopping daughter, the manager of the campus tour began his remarks on an unexpected note. A short, stout, bearded gentleman with a resonant voice who resembled Orson Welles, he greeted the group of around 150 parents and potential students with a confession. This venerable institution of higher learning, he intoned, had been built on a fraudulent foundation. Washington University, located in the heart of the west end of the city, sat on ground that had been stolen by Anglo settlers in the 17th and 18th centuries and “occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of the Osage Nation, Otoe-Missouria, Illinois Confederacy, Quapaw, Ho-Chunk, Miami, and many other tribes.” Without elaboration, he quickly went on to extoll, at length, the first-class education awaiting the lucky few who would be admitted to the school. Because tuition costs and acceptance rates at Washington University now rival those of Harvard and Princeton, this ritual confession of woke guilt over the school’s past cast a rather ironic light on the whole issue of privilege. (READ MORE: The Old Man and the Sea: An Allegory or No? )
Another, and far more serious, woke invocation of history came after Hamas’ savage Oct. 7 attack on Israeli civilians that involved cold-blooded murder, mass rape, the mutilation of children, and the taking of hostages. Defenders of this Palestinian outrage quickly turned to the past for justification. Using phrases like “settler colonialism” and “Western imperialists and racists,” they argue that because Jewish Zionists stole land from indigenous groups in Palestine with the creation of modern Israel, its citizens richly deserved this horrific payback. This rationalization comes from the Hamas Charter of 1988, which denounces “the Zionist invasion” and contends that “Palestine has been an Islamic Waqf [an endowment held in trust] throughout the generations…. There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad.” A 2017 revised charter reiterated that “Palestine is a land that was seized by a racist, anti-human and colonial Zionist movement.”
Many American defenders of the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7 simply parrot such arguments. The Duke Students for Justice in Palestine denounced Israel as “a military superpower illegally occupying and perpetuating violence on an indigenous Palestinian people, with the unwavering support of Western powers” while activist Najma Sharif offered a pithier, blood-chilling version of this defense: “What did y’all think de-colonization meant? vibes? papers? essays?”
what did y'all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.
— Najma (@najmamsharif) October 7, 2023
These episodes reveal what has become a central feature of the woke political crusade that now engulfs many college campuses and other left-leaning institutions of the United States: A reading of history that focuses almost entirely on victimizers and victims, oppressors and oppressed. Disciples of intersectional radicalism see the past as mainly a long, sordid story of assaults on underprivileged racial, gender, and religious groups by white (this now includes Jews), patriarchal, heterosexual, imperial, and Christian elites. They believe that the burden of studying the past is to unearth damning evidence of crimes committed by powerful groups who need to be brought to account. The burden of the present is to employ that evidence to dismantle this structure of oppression, liberate its victims, and provide justice and restitution for those crushed by its operation. If traditional historical narratives have been the opiate of the people, this victimizer/victim reading of history promises a restorative remedy.
The Left Oversimplifies History
However, the intersectional Left’s view of history creates a tangle of confusion and over-simplification that weakens our grasp of both past and present. Approaching history as a gigantic blame game produces not understanding, but misconception; not perspective, but distortion; not the discovery of knowledge, but the confirmation of prejudices. Among the many difficulties besetting woke history, four loom as the weightiest.
First, many intersectional radicals are ignorant of any actual knowledge of the oppressive history to which they endlessly appeal. For example, many pro-Palestinian activists are shockingly unaware of the tangled history of modern Israel and its neighbors. Ron Hassner, a political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, was taken aback by the horde of radical students justifying the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7 and attacking Israel as a villain. So he hired a survey firm to poll some 250 of the students to gauge their knowledge and probe their beliefs. The results were startling. Among woke students, 33 percent supported enthusiastically, and 53 percent moderately, the ubiquitous slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” But when asked which river and which sea, only 47 percent were able to identify them correctly. Instead of the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, a majority offered the Nile, the Euphrates, the Dead Sea, the Atlantic, and most bafflingly, the Caribbean. Only 25 percent knew who Yasser Arafat was, and 10 percent thought he was the first prime minister of Israel. Many could not identify the decade the Oslo Accords had been signed and a quarter insisted that the peace agreement had never been signed at all. Some of the radicals believed that “from the river to the sea” meant establishing a two-state solution instead of its evident meaning: Removing the state of Israel entirely. Agitating for the genocide of Israeli Jews demands little by way of knowing what you are talking about. (READ MORE: The Coming Ramadan War)
Second, woke disciples display a view of the past where an obsession with racial and gender oppression ignores other crucial factors in historical development like economic interest, religious loyalties, social tensions, cultural values, nationalist yearnings, demographic trends, and political ideology. With American Indian history in the Mississippi Valley, for example, woke disciples like those at Washington University, who excoriate the advance of white settlers from the east pay scant attention to the shifting tribal loyalties, conflicts, and interests among Indian tribes that predated European settlement and profoundly influenced its expansion across the continent. For centuries, power had ebbed and flowed among tribes who maneuvered and fought for dominion in the territory around St. Louis.
For instance, the notoriously warlike Osage tribe had migrated westward from the Ohio River (due to the expansion of the even more warlike Iroquois tribe to the east) and conquered much of the central Mississippi Valley. In earlier centuries, the area had been dominated by a “Mississippian Culture” that built the largest Indian settlement in pre-Columbian North America at Cahokia Mounds just east of St. Louis with a population upwards of 30,000 at its height from A.D. 1000-1200, while also practicing human sacrifice and slavery. The complexity of these shifting patterns of power and settlement among American Indians — replete with warlike values, land hunger, and power-seeking — do not exactly fit the intersectional narrative of white imperialists violating a peaceful, pastoral, indigenous Eden.
Third, intersectional idealogues harbor a fanatical, Manichean worldview that insists on seeing everything in history as a struggle between the wicked and the virtuous, the powerful and the powerless, and the saints and the sinners. In this historical morality play, there is no room on stage to ponder impulses and characteristics most adults know to be prominent in human affairs: mixed motives, divided loyalties, ironies, and unintended consequences. Hamas’ American apologists, for example, disregard a long list of factors complicating their vision of evil Israelis oppressing innocent Palestinians. These include widespread Palestinian support for Hitler and the Nazis during World War II; pogroms in Arab countries such as Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan that sent tens of thousands of non-European Jewish refugees streaming into the new state of Israel after its founding in 1948; and a long tradition of profitable land sales by prosperous Arab families and merchants to Jewish immigrants beginning in the 1870s that helped establish Jewish settlements in Palestine. Similarly, intersectional radicals are unwilling to confront the historical record of virulent anti-Semitism infecting the Arab world. For instance, the members of Hamas whom they defend as “freedom fighters” proudly proclaim, in their charter, loyalty to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood while pledging to eradicate infidels, especially the Jews (“The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’” Article 7 of the Hamas Covenant 1988).
Finally, the awakened Left commits — enthusiastically, unceasingly, and unrepentantly — the historian’s cardinal sin of “presentism.” Historians used to sternly warn that judging the past by the standards of the present was both unfair (those living in the past could not possibly have known nor acted according to modern standards of morality or good sense) and counterproductive (presentism often obscures genuine understanding of the reasoning, rooted in their circumstances, that motivated past actors). The wise historian understood that uncovering how and why the past was different from the present was one of the reasons to study it. But for woke zealots in the academy and their progeny chanting in the streets, presentism has become the raison d’etre for a historical approach that denounces evil-doers and defends the virtuous. The presentist conceit holding sway at Washington University, for instance, simply demands that we condemn the Anglo settlement of the Midwest in the 1700s and 1800s as an exercise in political virtue with no grasp of how or why new settlers moved into the area, how or why Indian tribes reacted to the challenge, and what alternatives might have been available to historical actors in that earlier era. It appears bad to us now, so it deserves condemnation. End of story.
Who Is Indigenous?
The crippling flaws in the woke approach to the past converge in the fashionable trend dominating much contemporary historical study: Post-colonialism. This academic and political project claims to recapture the history and agency of people victimized by imperialism. It decries both the subjugation of colonized people and the exploitation of their land, their culture, and their resources and the Western values, ideas, and interests that fueled imperialist ventures. For post-colonialist icons such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and C. L. R. James and their disciples, the struggle of indigenous peoples to defend their rights, protect their interests, and articulate their values in the face of imperialist horror (including the Enlightenment) lay at the heart of a necessary historical rendering. This paradigm frames the intersectional Left’s understanding of both the Palestinian and American Indian situations.
Yet post-colonialism refuses to confront an enormous problem staring it in the face: Indigeneity is not an easily identified state. If the modern Israeli state, for example, owes reparations and “a right of return” to displaced Palestinians, do the Palestinians and the Ottoman Turks owe likewise to the Malmuks and the Ayyubids they earlier ran out of the area? Do these Muslim invaders of the 7th century, who were part of the great Islamic conquest of the Middle East and North Africa, owe likewise to those they vanquished? And these groups to the Byzantines and Romans, whose dominion appeared before? And so on to the Greeks under Alexander the Great, the preceding Persians, and the earlier Jews, Canaanites, and Philistines of the Iron and Bronze Ages? Eventually, do the Cro-Magnons owe restitution to the Neanderthals? Obviously, locating where indigeneity starts and where it ends is something of a fool’s errand. (READ MORE: Britain Again Has a Choice: Civilization or Savagery)
Problems also arise from the post-colonial tendency to romanticize indigeneity to draw a stark contrast with greedy, authoritarian, racist, white imperialists. This is evident in American Indian history and the woke portrait of pastoral, peaceful, environment-nurturing, community-cherishing indigenous tribes who were cheated, bullied, and murdered by grasping European settlers. This image, of course, belies the inconvenient fact that Indians often exploited the environment by burning land to stampede game, slaughtering hundreds of buffalo by driving them over cliffs, and over-hunting deer and beaver to take advantage of emerging hide and fur markets; or that they often sold land to Europeans to gain advantage over other Indian adversaries in endless rounds of intratribal battles; or that Indians embraced practices of physical brutality as bad or worse than those of the European societies they confronted, including recurring warfare, slavery, human sacrifice, scalping, maiming, and disemboweling.
As a leading scholar of Indian life in the Mississippi and Missouri River valleys has concluded, long before the European arrival “war in the northern midcontinent was a part of everyday life” and the vision of “a peaceful midwestern pre-Columbian past is a product of the imagination. Proponents of such a harmonious vision, by romanticizing and idealizing past human relations, actually dehumanize such societies.”
Similarly, in Palestine, a long list of historical events and decisions vastly complicates the simple woke story of invading, calculating European Jews exterminating indigenous peasant farmers after World War II. Standing foremost is the persistent Palestinian refusal to accept a two-state solution. Following the recommendation of the Peel Commission in 1937, the United Nations Partition Plan of 1947 called for the establishment of a two-state arrangement in the area with clearly demarcated areas for Israeli and Palestinian governments to exist side by side. In 1948, the Israeli government accepted the plan, but the Palestinians refused — instead joining the Arab military attack on Israel launched by Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, which ended in disastrous defeat and created a flood of refugees who became the nexus of the problem for the next 75 years. Another instance came in 2000 at the Camp David summit called by outgoing President Bill Clinton, where Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak agreed to accept a Palestinian state with Arab Jerusalem as its capital and a return of the entire Gaza Strip and 95 percent of the West Bank to Palestinian control. Yasar Arafat rejected the offer, causing Clinton to denounce the decision as “an error of historic proportions.” As the longtime Israeli diplomat, Abba Eban, once quipped wearily about such intransigence, “The Palestinians don’t know how to take yes for an answer.”
History Is a Process
So what might a nuanced, fair-minded historical analysis suggest regarding the two situations addressed here? It would not blindly maintain that Palestinians never received bad treatment at the hands of Israeli immigrants or stubbornly insist that American Indians were never exploited by European immigrants. After all, it does no good to mirror the woke historical portrayal of good guys and bad guys by simply reversing the roles. Instead, a responsible historical reading might conclude that both Palestinians and Israelis have a legitimate claim to indigenous status in the area, which points to the need for a two-state solution that guarantees the existence of Israel while providing the Palestinians a place to call home. A responsible historical analysis might suggest that the plight of the American Indian is the stuff of tragedy more than cupidity, a historical inevitability that reoccurs when a tribal civilization of hunters, gatherers, and nomadic agriculturalists clashes with one that is more technologically, numerically, militarily, and organizationally advanced. History has seen the Romans vanquish the Gauls and the Britons, the Aztecs vanquish the Toltecs and the Tepanecs, and the Islamic Caliphate vanquish groups in the Middle East, North Africa, and southwest Asia, to note just a few such examples. Meaningless professions of guilt — the hand-wringers at Washington University have not returned any of the “stolen” land or wealth — and attempts to somehow turn back the historical clock remain fruitless. We can only guarantee a full measure of economic opportunity, social participation, and rights of citizenship for the American Indians.
The study of history, if it is to escape the clutches of leftist ideologues, must approach the past by recognizing that co-mingled merits and flaws, idealism and ambitions, rectitude and dissembling, self-awareness, and self-delusion characterize human beings of all stripes. It must recognize that tragedy, not oppression and victimization, is often the lot of human affairs, and that territorial power waxes and wanes with demographic shifts, economic developments, military power, social upheaval, and natural disasters such as disease, weather changes, and soil exhaustion.
History is best understood not as a simplistic tale of good guys and bad guys, but as a process that produces the present. Analyzing it is immensely complicated, full of shadows and wrong turns, and likely to raise perplexing questions and demand difficult judgments. While seldom producing easy answers to present dilemmas, it helps us understand the evolution by which we got to where we are. It reveals much about human nature, about how and why people act the way they do, about the kinds of circumstances, visions, or fears that inspire resistance to change or set change in motion. History, in other words, tells us why humans are hard, not easy, to understand. But as with any branch of knowledge, that is precisely why we engage in it. So while intersectional radicals may ransack the past seeking justification for their present ideological crusades, real historians probe its mysteries for perspectives to help us understand how our world became the way it is, and for insights that might make us wiser in trying to improve it. Ultimately, that is a far more enlightening and useful endeavor.