Doctors admit stealing property, but refuse to give it back

by philg

From the American Medical Association’s Organization Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity:

We acknowledge that we are all living off the taken ancestral lands of Indigenous peoples for thousands of years.

From “Prioritizing Equity video series: Police Brutality & COVID-19” (AMA):

I am Dr. Aletha Maybank, I am chief health equity officer at the American Medical Association over the Center for Health Equity. … We work to ensure equitable opportunities and conditions and innovation for marginalized and minoritized people and communities. … So I first want to recognize and acknowledge the land in which we are all sitting on and the Indigenous people who have been here for thousands of years before us, whose land was dispossessed at the same time, able to thrive and survive till this day.

(Doctors accuse the police of “brutality” (see the title), but aren’t doctors collectively a principal reason why lower income Americans end up entangled with the police? Medical bills, oftentimes starting at 5-10X what an insurance company would have paid, lead to evictions and personal bankruptcy (see “Enforcing Eviction: As a national housing crisis approaches, the police side with property against people.” (The Nation)).)

From the American Medical Association’s Advancing Health Equity: Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts:

The Association of American Medical Colleges’ headquarters is located in Washington, D.C., the traditional homelands of the Nacotchtank, Piscataway and Pamunkey people. The American Medical Association’s headquarters is located in the Chicago area on taken ancestral lands of indigenous tribes, such as the Council of the Three Fires, composed of the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi Nations, as well as the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac, Fox, Kickapoo and Illinois Nations.

Doctors are fairly rich. If they admit that they’re on stolen (“taken”) land, why don’t they give the land back to the nearest Native American and then pay him/her/zir/them rent?

Separately, the above language guide contains some helpful tips. It is not “individuals” but “survivors”; it is not “the obese” but “people with severe obesity” (remember that, whatever the term used, the #science-informed optimum medical response to a virus that attacks the obese is a next-to-the-fridge lockdown!):

Sometimes it is not that hard to achieve equity:

Sometimes it is, in fact, way easier than you’d think:

A revenue source by any other name would be just as lucrative?

If you hire people of only one skin color, that’s a “race-conscious” process:

How many enslaved persons show up at the typical U.S. healthcare facility?

If Justin Trudeau’s use of 2SLGBTQQIA+ has you scratching your head, turn to the glossary:

(“It is also not a term that can be used by a non-Indigenous person” yet there is no indication that a Native American contributed to this document. Isn’t putting the term in a glossary a “use” of the term?)

6 thoughts on “Doctors admit stealing property, but refuse to give it back”

  1. Thank you for keeping us updated on the latest language developments! I also like the term “minoritized”, it can be easily turned around:

    “The fact that Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Apple CEOs are either BIPOC or LGBTQ may leave people wondering if employees are artificially minoritized in the tech industry.”

    (Google also has just about 50% white employees in the U.S. alone.)

  2. Doctors? AMA is not doctors, with their support for coronainsanity we now know for sure that AMA is just a collection of woke quacks. Not a single qualified doctor among them.

    • When I stopped renewing my membership about 15 years ago, only about 10% of US doctors were AMA members.

  4. This is definitely the wrong way to do a land acknowledgement. You should never say “taken”, “stolen”, “dispossessed”, etc or people might actually be fooled into believing you actually intend to give the land back. With a few notable exceptions, we stole the land fair and square by treaty.

    (If someone asks you to give a land acknowledgement and you want to guarantee that they won’t ask you a second time, try this template: “Before we begin tonight I’d like to acknowledge that our event is taking place in the historical land of the Coast Salish peoples, who were its stewards prior to the treaty they signed with the United States in 1855.”)

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