Amazing how far you got in this thread with all that hair -splitting trollery.
Da fuq bruh, racist is racist. Any of it from a presidential contender is inexcusable and in need of swift and harsh condemnation. And anything like more subtle or “mild” racism needs to be rooted out even more deeply, because it’s more insidious.
I can only hope that you learned a bit here about how you’re fighting for the wrong side.
You know the saying - even a broken clock is right twice a day - well, when it comes to Elizabeth Warren and her false claims of Cherokee heritage, even the Donald is closer to the truth than is Warren. Cherokee genealogist Twila Barnes has done exhaustive and exemplary research into Warren’s background, and that of numerous white folks who pretend to be otherwise. Her blog. (Thoughts from Polly’s Granddaughter), which is non-political, gets to the hard facts: http://www.pollysgranddaughter.com/search/label/Elizabeth%20Warren
Well, it’s happening, so evidently it is American. More generally, it’s human. This sort of thing has been going on for millennia. Like every nation-state before it, someday the U.S. will disintegrate. In five billion years, the sun will have become a red giant and turned Earth into plasma. All of this amounts to not even a blip on the cosmological time scale and within the unfathomable vastness of the visible universe and its estimated 10^80 atoms, such events are less meaningful than a termite fart in a hurricane.
Step into the Total Perspective Vortex. It’s cozy in here.
We are aware.
Some of us are even mortified by it.
Let’s assume Warren’s not Cherokee, since it’s dubious, as was hashed out at length in 2012. So she was either misinformed by old family stories or is lying about her ancestry (which her political opponent claimed during the election, and has taken on a life of its own as a source for political attacks). She listed her Cherokee ancestry in a law school directory and it was mentioned while she was a prof. at Harvard Law, but she didn’t use her purported ancestry for personal benefit in school admissions or hiring, and it didn’t factor into any relevant hiring/admission decision. If she were lying you’d think she’d be doing so for some benefit, but she didn’t use it for educational/career gain, so it seems far more likely to be an old family story she actually believed.
Either way, calling her “Pocahontas” is belligerent racism, and is beyond the pale.
More on her ancestry claim and how it was used is here:
Trollery??
I’m not trying to antagonize or inflame anyone. I’m trying to argue that this specific incident is being mischaracterized.
I’m happy to call out Trump because the term Pocahontas is offensive, and I’ve accepted evidence that Pocahontas is more offensive than I realize. But the brunt of the criticism isn’t because he’s accused of using an offensive term. He’s being accused of denigrating Elizabeth Warren for being native, which he did not do.
Fighting on the wrong side of what?
Trump is a horrible racist, I think there’s a ton of solid evidence to that fact and if there’s anyone who thinks otherwise I’ll do my best to disabuse them of that notion.
But I’m not going to let an unfair criticism stand unchallenged just because the target is unpopular. I find that kind of blind mob justice to be deeply unethical.
I know you somehow think that Trump calling Warren “Pocahontas” isn’t racist, but a veiled political attack (grounded in a very dubious claim she was lying about her ancestry, mixed with a false attack that she lied for personal benefit to exploit admissions/hiring/something).
At the same time, can you understand why him making a dig at her by doing something that looks like using a stereotype might be seen as others as racist? Trump’s joke was far from fair, racist accusations aside, since it’s apparently a joke rooted in a political attack grounded in lies. Maybe instead of worrying about the fairness of this one you could worry about something less ambiguous than defending a cheap political attack grounded in lies that at least really smells like racism?
So it should be described instead as what? Just a little bit racist? Damn, go back to the playground on Avenue Q.
He’s being accused of denigrating Elizabeth Warren for being native, which he did not do.
More tedious-as-fuq hair splitting. However you pin down some precise conception of what he’s doing, he’s still deploying, spreading, and further fanning the flames of racism.
For Christ’s sake, “Pocahontas”? SRSLY?! Condemning that shit is not “mob justice,” it’s fair-minded calling out of dangerous demagoguery.
I’m not feeling as nice towards you as @nemomen seems to feel. For me, the kind of whitesplaining you’re doing gets real filling real fast.
Twila Barnes genealogical work really is exemplary. Her blog not only debunks claims made - but, unlike coverage in The Atlantic or other mainstream journals, it reveals the deeper truth from a Cherokee perspective.
I agree the joke was completely unfair and sounded racist, so coming from a racist it seems really racist.
But the reason I’m fighting the narrative is I try to follow the debate from the other side as well. And they love nothing better than explaining, using rational sounding arguments, how all his legitimately racist things aren’t actually racist and his opponents are being unfair.
Everyone uniformly condemns it as racist, then the other side presents a better than usual case that it wasn’t racist, and a few undecideds start listening to the Trump narrative and thinking this “racism” thing is overblown.
All Trump does is claim victimization, I don’t see any reason to give those claims an air of legitimacy.
I never saw anything about Warren claiming to be Cherokee, I saw her claiming to have a Cherokee ancestor, a claim based on a family history. “Trying to find people like her” likely referred to having primarily European ancestry but having a hint of native ancestry that she wanted to explore.
That a single genealogist apparently couldn’t find evidence is at worst evidence that her family history was wrong, I hardly see how that makes Warren a target of criticism.
If she really wanted she could get a DNA test to clear it up, but she’s under no obligation and DNA tests can open completely unrelated bags of worms that most people are uninterested in opening.
Elizabeth Warren heard she had a native great grandfather, that might be wrong, it doesn’t really matter.
Unless of course they were extremists and she was wisely not giving a photo op to a group with no other aim but to discredit her.
