Minorities have been treated horribly in the United States. This mistreatment — though reduced — still continues. But not all efforts to fix this problem are well-calculated to bring actual progress.
It has become common, for example, to state "land acknowledgments."
My church puts the following — which is read aloud — in every Sunday bulletin:
"[This church] is located within the traditional homelands of the Mary's River (Ampinefu) Band of Kalapuya. Today, living descendants of these people are a part of the Confederated Tribes of Grande Ronde and the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians.
"We honor all of the indigenous nations and their land with great gratitude and acknowledge the genocide and continuous displacement of indigenous people.
"We also acknowledge the enslaved Africans whose labor built the United, Divided, States.
"We acknowledge the harm inflicted upon the indigenous communities and people of color across the country."
This statement represents an effort by good people to improve our world.
But it seems to me that it makes exaggerated claims and leaves out important context, undermining its credibility.
It gives only a slight nod to an important distinction between damage done to indigenous people and slaves in the past, and its effects on individuals — indigenous and African-Americans — living here today.
European immigrants did treat the indigenous and African people outrageously.
Like all past actions, theirs have continuing consequences.
Negative stereotypes and political and social discrimination have continued to harm the descendants of these people.
But we cannot change the past, and "acknowledging" harm done to indigenous people and slaves in the past does not improve the lot of their descendants.
Nor does exaggerating the slaves' accomplishments.
The claim that the slaves "built the United States" is a huge exaggeration.
The United States was built by the labor of everyone here: indigenous people, immigrants, slaves, and their respective descendants.
Today's descendants of the abused slaves have disadvantages because of their ancestry, but they are also, and paradoxically, beneficiaries of that mistreatment.
Were it not for the mistreatment of their ancestors, today's individuals would not have been born.
Their great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers lived in different parts of Africa.
If they hadn't been rudely brought together here they could not have interbred to produce, generations later, many of today's African-Americans. (Other African-Americans immigrated here.)
Today's descendants of the slaves are also beneficiaries of past actions in another sense. More than 600,000 Americans died in the Civil War which ended slavery.
All American individuals, including the indigenous, are like the descendants of the slaves: none of us would have been born if horrible things had not happened in the past.
We all have two parents and four grandparents. The number of our ancestors doubles for every additional generation we go back, so at ten generations back each of us has 512 ancestors.
The odds that at least one these 512 ancestors would have married someone else if that someone else had not died or been killed in some historical atrocity would approach certainty.
And poof! No us! It only takes one missing link in the chain.
All past actions, bad and good, have continuing consequences. All current Americans, for example, benefit from scientific and medical discoveries by people in the past.
There are enough bad things today, things we might be able to fix, for us to be obsessed with "acknowledging" past sins.
Instead, we should concentrate on making enough improvements in the current world that they will outweigh any damage — such as to the environment — we are causing. Ideally, we will bestow a generally better world on our own descendants.
Not the least of these improvements could be government policies — like Medicare For All — that benefit everyone but would be especially helpful to racial minorities who inherited so many disadvantages.
Of course honest teaching of history is called for.
But If we were to "acknowledge" every past atrocity, we would have to list an endless catalog of horrors and would have no time for anything else.
Paul F. deLespinasse is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Computer Science at Adrian College. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1966, and has been a National Merit Scholar, an NDEA Fellow, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and a Fellow in Law and Political Science at the Harvard Law School. His college textbook, "Thinking About Politics: American Government in Associational Perspective," was published in 1981 and his most recent book is "The Case of the Racist Choir Conductor: Struggling With America's Original Sin." His columns have appeared in newspapers in Michigan, Oregon, and a number of other states. To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.