Are you Cherokee? Because I said you were overreacting.
And no, I don’t buy into the idea that an offended party gets to decide exactly how much of an outrage or insult has been made. I will listen and respect their viewpoints but ultimately I will decide for myself if I think they are overreacting.
This argument bewilders me, as does the OP article’s repeated references to the “controversial field of racial science.”
Sure, I agree there’s a legitimate discussion to be had about the misuse of racial identification and that racial purists sometimes use genetic testing to push their purile beliefs.
What I don’t understand is how that has jack-all to do with Warren.
You could fault her for allowing herself to be baited by a trolling racist, but there’s nothing implicitly racist about her use of a DNA test to verify her ancestry.
She didn’t take the test to prove her racial purity or use it to target any ethnic groups.
Warren made the same point in her video.
Trump has been attacking native Americans for longer than *Elizabeth Warren *has been in office.
As forWarren, from the article:
So maybe she could have handled this better, but the angle of your criticism against her seems more than a tad bit skewed.
Wrong. The comparison is to how ridiculous, racist allegations have been handled by the targeted politicians. You think Warren did it wrong, but I’m asking you if you think Obama did it right, and if so why that’s different. There are no “two sides”.
So whaddaya got?
I believe that she was overly invested in proving Trump wrong, and proving that she was indeed NA. And she and her staff geared up a strategy to stick it to Trump. But when the test came back and she was much less NA than she thought (1/64 to 1/1,024) she should have just released the results in a month or two, with no mention of Trump at all. She would have gotten her NA bona fides out there (to whatever extent possible) and wouldn’t have gotten in the mud with Trump - where she lost.
This IS a misuse of racial identification, is is pure colonial race base B.S these services have limited data and can’t tell if the tiny maker they have is Cherokee or if she had a relative from Terra Del Fuego. It is like someone testing and finding out that they have some Irish in them and then claiming that they are Chinese, it is honestly that absurd.
You augment is self justifying not only cultural appropriation, but you are randomly lumping 100’s of cultures and peoples with a varied and broad history into one hemisphere into one group who are “others” despite those facts.
You are literally arguing that the lumping of half the historical peopled world as being one homogenized group. Note this one group has been subject to massive genocidal programs within my life time. Between 1970 and 1976 alone, between 25 and 50 percent of Native American women were sterilized. Today this “race” which is more likely to be shot by police than any other group, and the police don’t even bother to investigate when women who are placed in this arbitrary group who are abducted and possibly killed.
This is colonial racial eugenics, and the fact that people don’t get that it is purely racism is a very real problem.
The obvious difference is that Obama was sitting on a full house, Warren barely had a pair of deuces. The fact that they handled it similarly is not evidence that they both handled it well.
I think the first part of your post is key. She was being trolled, and took the bait – hook, line, and sinker.
Her mistake was making the claim without having any kind of documentation (that I’m aware of). If she even had a family bible with a genealogy page in it, that would have been sufficient in the face of the inevitable challenge.
But once the claim was made, there was no good ending for her.
People who wouldn’t vote for her to begin with still won’t be voting for her.
Most of the people who would, still will in spite of it.
Then there will be a handful like Gus Gusterson who would have, but now won’t. Not because of the false claim, but because she has demonstrated questionable critical thinking skills in being drawn into taking the test. Probably not enough to change the outcome of any election, but still demonstrating a lack of confidence in her abilities.
The claim was that it was family lore. It was.
She says one thing and does another, like us Europeans seem to do. When she spoke in front of NCAI this February she received a standing ovation, she could have moved forward with respecting these groups but instead chose to release the DNA data.
The fact that she refuses to just move forward an apologize makes me lump her in with a “polite trump” grouping more every day. It is the outright betrayal of her promises, which she has claimed to reiterated but she continues to prove they are just lip service and lies. She is quickly losing her chance to admit her error and move forward, but by continuing to make Native American identity about racism instead of tribal sovereignty she is still insisting on digging a deeper hole.
Note the un-funny irony of her speech to the NCAI earlier this year.
http://www.ncai.org/Elizabeth_Warren_Address_to_the_National_Congress_of_American_Indians.pdf
I am a bit disheartening by my fellow progressives who rightfully call out the alt-right but then ignore situations like this. She is pandering to a group she doesn’t respect, and her actions do not match with her words.
Then again I am playing the fool here, as it is quite clear that my supposedly progressive community, like Senator Warren, only seem to care about these causes when it helps serve their own egos and at their convenience and don’t really care about helping minorities be treated as the equals they are.
Seattle Has the Highest Number of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Urban Areas
And that’s fine. But you don’t file official documents based on family lore.
I guess there isn’t much point here, you’re clearly digging your heels in on this talking point, but when you have your employer list you as Native American and have yourself listed as a Cherokee in a NA Cookbook you are doing a lot more than recounting family lore.
No, I’m not. Really, I’m not.
Noooooooo, I’m really, really not, but you seem really, really invested in believing that’s what I’m arguing.
This is horrible, and I don’t question the sincerity of your passion about such injustices, but by gum you need stop seeing everyone else who addresses these issues as a stone on which to grind your ax.
You accuse Warren and even myself of lumping all native American peoples into one homogenous “race”, but you yourself have just referred to them as “this one group,” “Native American women” and “(any other) group”.
K’mon dude. If you’re gonna give yourself that kinda’ slack, don’t go pulling on everyone else’s reigns. Else how are we ever going to have any meaningful conversation?
I have to lump people in as being black or hispanic too, because that is what the reporting categories are, and the people in power, us “white people” created these labels. Despite being a social construct the effects of racism are real, and one of the arbitrary categories that is a product of that racism is “Native American”.
Can you honestly not differentiate between the concept of a non-biological label that is used to oppress from a specific claim to belong to a specific tribe based on those same racist and artificial categories? Warren’s DNA test can’t tell the difference between Fuegian, Salish, Coeur d’Alene, or Cherokee. Consider that while “black” is also not a biologically meaningful term, we still often have to refer to the category that is a product of racism.
Warren has refused to talk to the Cherokee Nation leaders for years now, and has resorted to pseudo-scientific racist theories to justify an old lie. She is avoiding an apology and dehumanizing the same people she directly promised to protect.
Your attempt to argue an alt-right style whataboutism tu quoque doesn’t change those realities.
She has made and continues to make promises she keeps breaking, when what was required was an apology. She has refused contact by the only group who could take offence and accept an apology, the Cherokee Nation, despite their requests and offers to talk.
Warren should have just ignored the Pocahontas thing rather than pour gas on the flames. It’s like as if Trump taunts his opponent as having a “2-inch dick” and then his opponent defiantly posts “proof” that his dick is 7 inches long. You lose by winning a game in which the only winning move is not to play. Why play Trump at his game? Warren just came out looking all the worse for it.
Trump had nothing to lose, his party has demonstrated that racism is not a disqualify but can in fact be an advantage.
The problem is that those apologizing and justifying Warrens racism are cementing that right-side groups beliefs while also alienating minorities. Once again, money and race are social constructs and their effects are real. But there is no biological basis in race and cultural identity is not a biologically inherited trait either. While I like a lot of Warren’s policies, her racist generation can’t age off the planet fast enough, hopefully the do so before reversing the progress to equality too much.
There is no scientific basis for race, It’s a made-up concept with very negative results.
rat avatar, what is the pseudo scientific racist theory you’re talking about? That certain genetic markers are attached to certain demographics?
Let me put this in context, if you have a drop of European ancestry, not only are you 100% certain to be a direct descendant of Charlemagne, every single person who was alive in 900AD who has living decedent is also your direct Great---*-grandparent.
At that stage you would have had 1,125,000,000,000,000 other great grandparents besides Charlemagne. Obviously there weren’t that many people alive at that time, but every Frank, Jew, Basque person alive at that time in your direct line.
If you don’t get the reason why someone may test for a marker that shows up in Iranians and then use that to claim that they are English I would suggest more research.
While science can trace some flows of some populations, they typically are only looking at one in 2[sup]n[/sup] family members using yDNA and mtdna. The aDNA is not as conclusive as you would think for mapping individuals to specific areas.
In the case of the peoples who were in the Americans before European colonization the estimate is that the effective population that came across was around 70 individuals.
These DNA testing companies go off of a base Asian sample and then track a few changes and apply the “Native American” label to everyone.
People are just really bad at math or are way too optimistic that inbreeding was consistent over time and buy into the ethnic origins estimates.
While you can get a gist about it, the problem becomes when you try and use those changes to make claims based on eugenic racial categories. Which is what Warren did here.
“Hey look I have some Eurasia DNA, obviously I am Welsh”
When you do this and ignore the very real impact of racism on minorities, and that culture and heritage are separate from DNA you are marginalizing the differences that doe make these groups interesting while also minimizing their culture.
Note that I appear to be the only person actually posting the various people who are categorized in this groups voice. Why are you so quick to dismiss their concerns? why is Senator Warren’s feelings about being called out on a lie more important than their voices?
Because that is the effect of re-enforcing this debunked eugenic racial theories.
Say what!?
Let me try and parse that:
“Can you honestly not differentiate between:
A) the concept of a non-biological label that is used to oppress
… from …
B) a specific claim to belong to a specific tribe based on those same racist and artificial categories?”
Nope, you lost me.
I think your eagerness to drive home some kind of point is becoming a hinderance to actually conveying what that point is in a meaningful way.
Do you mean: can I differentiate between something like
A) An arbitrary racial identifier like “Black” or “Native American” (or perhaps an implicitly racist label like “American Indian” or “Eskimo”) being used to denigrate people
and
B) A person’s voluntary choice to use such a label for themselves for the purpose of identification with a cultural or ethnic group ?
If that’s what you mean, then yes, I can of course differentiate between those different uses of racial labels.
Not sure why you’d ask that of me, and I kinda’ feel we’re going off on a weird tangent.
I’m just trying to point out to you that while you’re being very critical of others for daring to use broad ethnic labels, and are attributing non-benign intentions to their usage, you are using such broad labels yourself.
If you feel your use of such labels is justified because you are using them without ill intent, please consider that just maybe other people are also using them without ill intent.
OK, but if you feel you have to use such terms because they’ve been foisted one you by a racist society, maybe you should not jump to criticize others for doing the same when they clearly have no ill will.
Good grief…
Please, … just, please don’t do this.
Please.
As for Elizabeth Warren, I hope she will continue to learn from her mistakes and go on fighting the good fight, championing issues of social justice and advancing progressive politics.
She ain’t perfect, but then who of us is? Not I.
Because I am not using the terms to try and JUSTIFY the biological concept of race.
Good grief…
Please, … just, please don’t do this.
Please.
Please learn that using science to justify racism is not helping solve the problem.
This is latterly what is going on here, Warren is trying to claim that race is a biologically based concept and it is not. The fact that she is doing so while claiming heritage and culture, while actually silencing those who are part of that culture is a problem.
If you want to claim that there is a biological basis for race why not admit so, vs trying to hand wave away minority groups concerns because you don’t like the implications. You will still be wrong, but I am betting that is not your intent but it is the effect.