I read Sanders’s comment to be about voting Americans, not that a woman couldn’t be qualified to be President. I have heard a number of women friends and relatives say essentially the same thing; that the American people won’t vote a woman into the Presidency. I can’t say they are wrong - I don’t personally believe that, but after I told them all that I was certain Trump would not, in the end, be elected President, I have no credibility on this subject with my friends. :-/
Oh, well, if we’re adding context we should mention that the opponent they both hope to run against lies dozens of times a day on virtually every topic from the trivial to the serious, and that many of the people who bring up Warren’s misapprehension of her own family background seem perfectly fine supporting someone who has told *thousands *of lies in the last three years alone (not to mention the Trump University fraud case and the use of the Trump Foundation to divert charitable donations to Trump business and political rallies).
But yeah. Liz Warren once wrote a thing on a form decades ago. Let’s focus on that. For context.
I thought lying about things in your past was acceptable for presidential candidates now. The evidence seems to support this.
This was almost certainly a calculated “leak” from the Warren campaign. Don’t know yet if Warren herself pulled the trigger, or if an underling leaked it without getting her permission. Either way, this is a good test for Bernie, and a good example of why we have these long primaries – to really test the eventual nominee.
I still like both Warren and Bernie. Even if this is a “dirty trick”. Dirty tricks in politics are fine by me, as long as they work (and as long as they’re for my favored candidate!).
This.
She believed something her mother told her. That’s it. End of story.
The story requires nothing more than this simplest explanation.
Furthermore, the DNA test shows that what her mother told her was true, although possibly not to the degree that Elizabeth Warren expected.
This doesn’t matter at all and doesn’t change my opinion on either of them one iota. The reaction to it will probably affect how I see supporters of one or both of them, but not actually saying it.
Now Warren isn’t my preferred candidate, but this post is garbo.
Do you realize that this thing that you posted shows that your claim is calumnious bullshit?
“Someone also lied about being Native American for half their life,” is at odds with your statement that there are, in fact, Native Americans in her family tree.
So not only is your claim that Warren lied false, you are aware of and providing evidence of its falseness.
Why would you do that?
And it just comes out wrong no matter the intent behind it.
(Hey, everybody knew a Black liberal Democrat could not get elected… until one was. But I wonder if any veteran pol ever told upstart Barack to his face, “dude, no way they’re gonna vote for the Black guy”. Remember how precandidate Biden got pummelled for referring to Obama as “clean and well spoken”?)
:smack:
This gets at the crux of the issue: in the eighties, how white people defined being part Native American, and how most Native Americans defined being part Native American, were really different.
For a lot of white people, having any family legend of Native American ancestry sufficed to qualify you for this little bit of exotic noble savage heritage. For a lot of Native Americans (at least the authors from the time period I’ve read, who admittedly are the sorts of people who care enough about political issues to write articles and essays), what was more important was cultural connection: living on a reservation, participation in tribal events, and the like.
Warren made her claims in good faith and white privilege. She wasn’t lying, but she was thinking about things in a pretty shallow, possibly racist manner. She deserves criticism for that.
But she’s also, I think, indicated that she regrets her earlier attitude. I might take direction on how to interpret her apology–but whatever direction I take won’t be from anyone who calls her Pocahontas.
That’s a terribly stupid thing to post. Having NA ancestry in the distant upper branches of your family tree doesn’t make you an ‘American Indian’. So my statements are not at odds.
If my great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother was Nigerian, that wouldn’t make me African. And if I put down on a census form that I was fucking Black when anyone with eyes can see I’m white as a sheet, that would make me - like Elizabeth Warren - a liar, an imbecile, a nutcase, or some combination of the three. And if I then took a DNA test and doubled down on national television then it’d be all anyone would talk about, and rightly so, because it’d be completely fucking mental!
Imagine if Bernie had spent decades saying he was Black. Imagine a white Ivy League university had taken him on and crowed about how they had a Black man on the faculty. Imagine if Bernie said he knew he was Black because his parents told him, or because of the shape of his grandfather’s nose. Imagine if he submitted a soul food “family recipe” to a Black cookbook which turned out to be stolen from the New York Times? Would anyone be shrugging it off as irrelevant?
So why did Warren say it? Was it because, as you say, she learned it at her mother’s knee? I’d buy that if she passed the Texas bar when she was twelve. But she wasn’t twelve. She was an adult woman, and if her critical faculties were strong enough to get her through a bar exam, they should’ve been strong enough for her to realise, upon seeing her own reflection, that she wasn’t an American Indian; that she was, instead, a member of the race that massacred the American Indians, and that therefore putting herself down as an American Indian on her fucking census form was a really bad idea.
I can’t crowbar my mind open wide enough to accommodate the possibility that Warren is that stupid. The only other option is that she lied. And this matters because it speaks to her character, and character is important in elections. It also matters to the OP because I’m not going to believe someone who lies about her own race over Bernie Sanders.
I certainly can. Family lore can be extremely powerful, even for smart people. If she was taught all her life that she had NA ancestry, than she’s likely to believe it, at least when she was a young adult.
I like Warren and I like Sanders, and this stuff really doesn’t mean anything compared to their stance on the issues and their proposed strategy to beat Trump.
Look, if Warren gets the nomination I’ll support the shit out of her, but until then I’m not going to pretend she doesn’t have integrity problems.
Right. And she’s from Oklahoma. My wife is from Oklahoma as well. There are a lot of people who claim some Native American heritage from there for obvious reasons. Sometimes that heritage gets attenuated.
And as for the looking in the mirror comment - one of my best friends is half-Mexican. You would never be able to tell that if you looked at him. In fact people have made anti-Mexican jokes in front of him because they assumed he was just a generic white dude.
This (and the other times you’ve said this or something similar in this thread) demonstrates a misguided, inaccurate and, frankly, offensive belief about what defines a person’s ethnicity. There are many Native Americans who “don’t look” like they are (to an uninformed and biased eye). NOBODY can tell by looking in the mirror, or looking at another person’s face, whether or not they are Native American. Skin tone, hair and eye color, etc., are of no more importance in determining a person’s membership in a tribe than their shoe size or fingernail length.
I realize we’ve probably hijacked this thread since the thread is about gender (hopefully mods can come stop this,) but:
IMHO, it should be common courtesy that you shouldn’t try to claim benefits for something unless you actually took the cons with the pros of that thing as well and actually walked the walk. If you look white in every way, and never actually faced discrimination for being Native American (or Hispanic, or black, or Arab, or Asian, or whatever,) then you shouldn’t try to play that card for the benefit. If you didn’t pay or suffer the price, don’t collect the affirmative action or benefit or whatever.
If Warren were someone who were half-white and half-Native-American, but looked visibly Native American and had been getting treated her whole life as one, then that would be different.
This is a question worth arguing, in the abstract, and your position is reasonable in many ways (and can be applied in a wide variety of specific cases).
But in this specific case, is there any evidence whatsoever that Warren ever claimed any or collected any benefits as a result of believing she had Native American ancestry? I know of no such evidence.
When NA casinos started making a lot of cash many people suddenly found out they were members of the tribe. 
She said it because she believed it and she believed it because it was part of family lore. Family lore that was verified to some degree by a DNA test.
Furthermore she did look in the mirror and thought that what she saw there indicated she was Native American because she was told from a very young age that the high cheekbones in her family were a Native American trait.
“No, as I said, these are my family stories. I have lived in a family that has talked about Native Americans, talked about tribes since I had been a little girl. I still have a picture on my mantel and it is a picture my mother had before that - a picture of my grandfather. And my Aunt Bea has walked by that picture at least a 1,000 times remarked that he - her father, my Papaw – had high cheek bones like all of the Indians do. Because that is how she saw it and your mother got those same great cheek bones and I didn’t. She thought that was the bad deal she had gotten in life. Being Native American has been part of my story, I guess, since the day I was born.”
You are free to say she is stupid for believing something she was told over and over again all her life. I disagree. Her family lore led her to believe that she had Native American ancestors, and more importantly a DNA has since shown that her family lore was correct. It’s not stupid to believe that even if her belief was greatly exaggerated compared to her actual Native American ancestry.
Finally, it is pure balderdash to say that she was or is being dishonest about this, and that’s the claim I objected to from the outset.