Elizabeth Warren's Ancestry

[aluchko]

@hello_friends

It’s characterizing an individual person by race so, yes, racist.

It’s characterizing an individual person for claiming to be something they weren’t.

@hello_friends

Racists often want to claim they were pure of heart so not racist. It’s more of a strict liability offense. Most racism is unconscious.

But if you think that racist fucker doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing, you haven’t been paying attention.

I agree Trump is racist. And I’d say this nickname is unfair since Warren, even if she’s not native, was making a good-faith claim based on family history.

But just because Trump is racist doesn’t mean everything he says is racist. And claiming he was being racist when there’s a solid non-racist interpretation, makes it that much easier for his defenders to claim he’s not being racist in general by giving them an easy case to start with.

@subextraordinaire

However, a lot of Native American history is based upon oral tradition so I don’t know why she’d necessary be mistaken.

I haven’t followed enough to know if there’s good reason to think the claims were mistaken.

@Brainspore

Even if her family’s oral accounts are accurate she’d be only 1/32 Native American ancestry and she never claimed to self-identify as anything other than white.

He claims she did. That doesn’t mean he’s racist, it means he’s lying.

@Brainspore

“Indian” is largely considered a dismissive and outdated term for white people to use when referring to Native American/Indigenous populations. It’s not quite the same as saying “The Negro” but it’s on its way there.

Though there’s not really a good compact term for referring to native americans, I’ve heard Amerindian but that’s hardly widespread.

@Daedalus

Calling her “Pocahontas” and getting “war whoops” from the audience is not a claim of doubt as to her ancestry.

Yes it is, that’s been his claim all along. The audience response is racist since they’re performing a racist caricature of natives. But Trump’s claim isn’t that she native, but that she invented a fake aboriginal ancestry.