Recent article concerning Obama's comment on immigration lacks point
Stevan Novakovic’s column in the Feb. 19 edition of The Daily Gamecock is one of the most puzzling columns in a while. Either I missed the point or Novakovic just forgot to include one.
The column used a President Barack Obama quote (“Unless you were ... a Native American, you came from some place else”) as a jumping-off point to explain how Native Americans maybe weren’t the first people in America.
Novakovic tells us theories about Europeans predating Native Americans. While the theories he names aren’t crackpot theories, they definitely aren’t widely accepted by, well, anyone except the people named in the article. The theories started with arrowheads in New Mexico (called Clovis arrowheads) that kind of look like arrowheads found in southern France. Rather than accepting the widespread idea that two cultures designed a similar arrowhead (because, honestly, how many ways are there to make an arrowhead?) some academics speculated that some Stone Age people hopped on a boat 20,000 years ago, sailed to America and walked to New Mexico. Yeah, I’m a little skeptical too. But the theories hung around because you can’t 100 percent disprove that some Stone Age Europeans didn’t come to America via a miracle.
However, no academics, not even the ones Novakovic names, imply what he himself goes on to imply — that Native Americans wiped out the Clovis.
But forget the suspect history. What really bothered me about his article was that it had no point. Let’s buy into the theories for a second and pretend Europeans did get here before other Native Americans. How does that affect Obama’s point or the immigration debate period? He doesn’t answer this question. The closest he gets is an attempt at pithiness, where he equates what Europeans did to Native Americans to what he believes Native Americans did to the Clovis, and what modern immigrants are doing now. Because I guess immigrants trying to find work is the same as Native Americans supposedly replacing Clovis culture, or Europeans taking Native American land while simultaneously giving them smallpox.
He also writes, “These hypotheses are inconvenient if one wishes to purport that America was founded on white settlers massacring poor natives, especially as it appears that these original civilizations (the Clovis) were wiped out by current tribes.” Is Novakovic saying he is skeptical Europeans mass murdered Indians? Or that since some Indians may have been guilty of taking land from other tribes 10,000 years earlier, it was justified for Europeans to kill and enslave them while stealing their land? Either way, the sentence is not only nonsensical — it’s offensive.
Really I’m not mad at Novakovic. He has a right to type offensive things, just like I have a right to think that his article was less intellectual than my nephew’s crayon drawings. But The Daily Gamecock doesn’t have to publish it. The paper should publish controversial columns. But the columns should at least have a coherent point. Novakovic’s article didn’t even clear that low bar, and The Daily Gamecock should have found something else, anything else, to run in its place.
-— Dylan Knight, fourth-year history student