Don’t you get a guilty thrill when a celebrity’s virtue signaling blows up in their face?
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Billie Eilish was on top of the world — and, apparently, on “stolen land” — when she accepted the prestigious “Song of the Year” award at the Grammys. Her speech — and the backlash it unleashed — ended up serving as more of a eulogy for an absurd fad as opposed to saying anything meaningful.
Before Eilish could even decide where to display her latest Grammy, her carefully delivered speech came boomeranging back from an unexpected quarter: a Los Angeles law firm.
Suddenly, the feel-good sermon about stolen land had wandered off the Grammy stage and into the decidedly less glamorous world of deeds, property records, and real-estate law.
And that’s where things got personal for the wealthy singer.
Eilish’s roughly $3 million Glendale home sits on what the Gabrielino Tongva people describe as their ancestral land. After Eilish declared at the Grammys, “No one is illegal on stolen land,” the Tongva issue suddenly had a new celebrity-sized spotlight.
At the time of her speech, she hadn’t heard of the Sinai Law Firm, a Los Angeles real-estate group specializing in evictions. The firm offered, tongue firmly in cheek, to represent the Tongva Tribe pro bono — and even announced that a 30-day eviction notice was ready for the singer.
The whole episode had become painfully awkward.
Eilish may have been committed to solidarity with Indigenous people, but she hardly expected her own real estate holdings to enter the public discourse. “Turn over the deed,” challenged one unimpressed viewer, “Or step off your soapbox.” Social media can be a merciless taskmaster, especially when it demands a celebrity put their property where their politics are.
Let’s be fair: Eilish presumably hadn’t commissioned an ancestral-land search before signing the deed to her Glendale home. And where, exactly, could she buy a house in Southern California without running the risk of discovering that someone else had lived on the land before her? We aren’t talking about the previous owner of a posh property, either.
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The “land-acknowledgments” boomerangs have been making the rounds, and Kyle Smith dissected its absurdities in his Wall Street Journal “Free Expression” column.
Smith skewered the intrinsic logic behind the fading trend with the pointed analogy: “It’s as if a robber announced, ‘I took your jewelry and feel bad about it, but no way am I giving it back.’
Eilish soon discovered such sentiments had become part of an avalanche of criticism that erupted within hours of her speech. It must have been especially jarring to discover the backlash wasn’t just coming only from angry white people. Even a publication hardly hostile to progressive politics, the New York Times, recently ran a guest essay titled: “I’m Native American (and) Land Acknowledgments are Infuriating” by Reid Walker, a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation.
Walker, apparently weary of the ritual, offered a pointed statement: “The test isn’t in the words. It’s in what action comes after the words have been spoken.”
Perhaps the observation may inspire anguished liberals to channel their high anxiety into more productive behavior, and not worry about hearing from law firms. For the sake of clarification, the Sinai legal group later confirmed the offer was satirical. But the punchline wasn’t lost on the public.
Eilish may take away one more lesson for the indigenous-land saga: Nobody really wants to sit through someone else’s elaborate exercise in white-privilege-guilt or watch celebrities lecture TV-land viewers with yet another round of self-congratulatory moral affirmations.
Perhaps the greatest act of solidarity would be to stop patronizing indigenous people who never asked for the patronage in the first place.
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