After observing the turnout in 2008, 2012, and 2016, I have concluded that the Democratic party has nominated its last white Presidential candidate. Sorry, Liz!
How much does it take to “qualify”?
Good question. The answer can be found using the remainder of my response as context; to summarize: I would simply not take anyone seriously making the claim they are Native if they weren’t enrolled, or if they didn’t know their culture, didn’t bother to learn some of the language, and didn’t have family ties to the land etc.
Think of tribes more as sovereign, domestic dependent, nations, which is the relationship that many of the tribes have entered into by treaty with the U.S.A. I’m 1/4 Irish, but I would never presume myself to speak for Ireland, I would never fake my way into a position requiring expertise and cultural understanding of the Irish. If I was 1/64 French, I quite easily acknowledge that while I can have opinions about a subject, I certainly could not speak on behalf of the French people. And yet in Indian Country this happens ALL THE TIME.
This brings up a very interesting point: blood quantum as qualification for tribal membership. What happened on the east coast is that many tribes suffered massive de-population due to disease. So those tribes tended to adopt white people and black slaves (either runaways or freemen) who surprisingly found tribal life to be a better deal than colonial life. Blood quantum rules were written into treaty agreements and adopted by many tribal governments; this was meant to shrink and further de-populate the tribes in hopes that eventually tribal culture and identity would disappear altogether allowing the government to finally dissolve tribal arrangements and free up all of that land for white people.
Blood quantum is a highly contentious topic, and one that I don’t necessarily espouse.
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As the USA increasingly becomes a mixed race society, it’s a topic that’s not going to be able to be kept off the table.
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"we have got to take on Trump’s attacks against the environment, against women, against Latinos and blacks and people in the gay community, we’ve got to fight back every day on those issues. But equally important, or more important: We have got to focus on bread-and-butter issues that mean so much to ordinary Americans.”
Sanders said those “ordinary Americans” are “not staying up every day worrying about Russia’s interference in our election.” Instead, he said, “They’re wondering how they’re going to send their kids to college” or “how they’re going to be able to pay the rent” or “whether they can afford health care.”
SKKRRRRT."
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My read would be that the Americans who are “staying up every day worrying about Russia’s interference in our election” are disproportionately white and above the median income.
After ten months of Trump tripping over his own shoestrings nearly every day:
“Trump runs a dead heat with Hillary Clinton among 2016 voters in a hypothetical rematch in this ABC News/Washington Post poll, underscoring Clinton’s own enduring unpopularity.”
AFAIK, down here in Oz, as far as the indigenous folks are concerned, you’re one of them if you’re accepted as one of them. I don’t think blood comes into it.
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It’s not about who is worried about Russia or who is not.
It’s that he lists minority groups and acknowledges their concerns, but says that the focus should be on the more important issues of “ordinary (white male) Americans”
“Sanders juxtaposes “ordinary Americans” against women, Latinx and black people and the LGBTQ community as if they were different groups. He also frames those “ordinary Americans” and their issues as “equally … or more important” than that of the marginalized communities he lists before.”
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Is there any awareness at all within establishment Dem circles of just how ferociously pissed off the Black Left is with them?
There is no public acknowledgement that I can see, but I don’t know if that is just tactical PR strategy.
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"the Bernie-to-Bankruptcy Batista voters are just as delusional about white privilege and institutional racism as their deplorable brethren are.
Sanders has received a lot of criticism—notably from me and especially on this site—about the problems with his colorblind policy. Racism is an economic issue. As is sexism. As are homophobia and transphobia. The same goes for Islamophobia.
This is not hard, and I can help with the recipe for success. Talk about economic policy in all the aforementioned forms, rather than just “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs,” and voilà, you might actually put together a winning coalition."
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Exactly. And I have absolutely nothing against cultural sharing and all that, but the present reality
True, I don’t think there’s a lot of “blood quantum” issues outside of the USA and Japan. But it’s a small world: indigenous/aboriginal/native people regularly meet with each other in these modern times and exchange stories about post-colonialism, and in some regards, I’m glad I was not born as a Down Under Native, because that’s some serious bleak shit.
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This is my surprised face.
I forget: what happened in 1992, 1996, 2008, 2012?
Also (hint): only Russians and Republicans and useful proxies of same use “Dems”.
Christ on a goddamn cracker, is there no one in the ‘rising star’ tranche of the Dems that can be an operator? Pursue social and economic justice, and be soldiers with a job to do? Throwing around the optics of words like ‘rigged’ when the president is simultaneously embroiled in concerns about the handiwork of foreign intelligence services, money laundering, and the like, and throws constant shade about engineered injustices to provide cover for his fuckwittery, and we’re going with rigged?
Yep, the DNC leadership had a preference. You want to tidy up some of that procedural stuff, make it happily blind so the next drop to Russian intelligence cutouts doesn’t make so much damn smoke, I will add my name to your letter. But no, the fundraising docs are not especially incriminating. No, Bernie wasn’t more popular among prior Dem voters, especially the Dems of color that have constituted the majority of the party for numerous election cycles- and if you imagine that a former member of a Trotskyist party was going to somehow capture that slender wedge of votes in Wisconsin away from a rambling racist billionaire with a rousing chorus of The Internationale reminding them of the power of economic solidarity (when it’s fresh in the news that Republican candidates can apparently still call people commies as a slur, this long after the Cold War) or was going to survive oppo research when it’s a very real possibility that video exists of him chanting with Sandistas that Yankees should die- well, I would like to live in your universe. It sounds cuddly.
Dems lost because we live in a country that has always had a terrifying fraction of authoritarian nativists, and their buttons were pushed in a pattern that triggered a nasty zero-day in our constitutional kludge. The only thing that will make this worse is if at the midterms, Dems are still flagellating themselves using the other team’s linguistic weapons instead of representing the growing tide of pissed growunps.
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Pfffffff.
And now, Donna Brazile is saying that the bombshell isn’t that Clinton “rigged” the primaries, but that the DNC fucked up.
I expect quite a few commenters will now be saying that Donna Brazile is a pro-Clinton shill, and her clarifications should be disregarded in favor of the “Clinton is the root of all evil!” narrative we’ve seen here.
Well Joy-Ann Reid is absolutely a Clinton shill, and that seems to be whose opinion is presented here.
