Of course. “Just asking questions”. 
So, that’s your response when you ask a dumb question that has no basis in reality? Good to know. Not surprising, but good to be reminded of.
This is a helpful example, precisely because it’s so different from the case at hand. IF:
- A person deliberately lies about their heritage
- In just one instance
- In a way that has no other effect than to change a hiring decision
- And never claims that heritage again;
THEN:
That person is a schmuck.
But let’s consider some other possibilities.
If someone changes their name because they get married, and they’ve married someone Hispanic, and they have some weird belief that they’re now Hispanic by marriage because their husband’s family is Hispanic and they’ve joined families, and they check that Hispanic box, but later someone sets them straight that their goofy belief about ethnicity is totally goofy so they don’t do it again–then we’ve got almost precisely the same scenario you described, except massively different motives. It’d be very difficult to distinguish the two cases without an explicit statement of motives on the part of the offender. In the second case, I’d say the person had a stupid way of thinking about ethnicity, but their behavior in the past about ethnicity wouldn’t be relevant today.
“A question that has no basis in reality” would accurately describe your own so-called “hypothetical”. :rolleyes:
Has it not occurred to you yet that to reach your desired conclusion about Warren requires positing a different set of facts than those that actually exist? And that your attempt to smear her by insinuation with this so-called “hypothetical”, the facts being against you, has only a negative influence on your credibility in pressing it regardless?
Regards,
The Reality-Based Community
I will point out, magellan, that I had to read this verrrry carefully to figure out that you were accusing elvislives of something, and not characterizing your own hypothetical about Mr. Latino in an unusually candid manner :).
Unbelievable. You may want to look up the word “hypothetical”. And you may want to reread what I wrote and ignore for a third time that I explicitly stated that the situation I constructed did not mirror the Warren situation.
The hypothetical demonstrated that a candidate’s claim can be questioned even if it has not been offered as a reason for people to vote for them, as it can go to character. If you have a problem with THAT proposition, I’d love to hear it.
Come to think of it, you might want to look up “reality”, as well.
But we (well, the rest of us) *are *discussing the Warren campaign, and the credibility of Brown’s, and his loyalist supporters’, attacks on her character. We here in the Reality-Based Community can take the fact that you have to *invent an alterate reality *in order to make those attacks credible as evidence of the falsehood of those attacks - as well as evidence of the character of Brown and his loyalist supporters.
Got it now?
No, no, Elvis. Imagine a candidate who has claimed to be Satan incarnate and has used that claim to avoid traffic tickets and to get the best date to the prom and to secretly bully Satanist politicians into passing favored legislation. Surely you agree that Mr. Fake Satan’s claims can be brought up by an opponent in a debate, right? QED Warren Bad or something.
Only if there’s actual evidence that his claims to be Satan were false, not merely supported only by the oral traditions of the Lucifer family, natives of Hades for many generations back. And that he wouldn’t have avoided those traffic tickets etc. if he’d been only partly diabolical at most.
Like I said before, Scott Brown is betting his whole candidacy on trying to undermine Elizabeth Warren’s legitimacy and integrity by insinuating that Elizabeth Warren got some sort of favorable treatment because she “checked the box” He can’t bring himself to actually say that this disparate treatment for Native Americans is wrong (he lets others fill in the blanks) and he is “just asking questions” but in the end, he is facing a very hostile electorate. His Gorver Norquist pledge is coming back to bite him in the ass and undercuts his “I’m running as a Republican but I’m really an independent”
Except it’s not just “Easterners” who question how many people in Oklahoma actually are of Native American descent versus being sufferer of Cherokee Princess Syndrome.
To give one prominent example from Oklahoma, Grayson Noley, the Chair of the Department of Education at the University of Oklahoma and one of the more prominent Native American scholars in the country has often ridiculed the notion that so many whites in Oklahoma and Texas are descendants of Native Americans saying** “If you have to search for proof of your heritage, it probably isn’t there.”**
In that article, though, the quote’s context seems pretty clear: he’s not talking about descent, he’s talking about culture, when he uses the word “heritage.”
You are appallingly obtuse.
Most probably Elizabeth Warren has Cherokee and Delaware ancestry on her mother’s side. That the obnoxious Senator from Massachusetts would make that ridiculous/bigoted claim that “anyone can see she’s not” when referring to Warren’s physical appearance is racism itself.
To quote:
“Professor Warren claimed she was a Native American,” he added pointedly, “And as you can see, she’s not.” My jaw dropped to the flaw when Brown said that.
It raises the obvious question: which of her facial features alerted Brown that she has no Native American blood coursing through her veins? Surely, if she possessed whatever tiny fraction of one’s DNA must trace back to an indigenous tribe before he or she is deemed to be Native American, she’d have shiny, jet-black hair or a tan complexion. Or was it the absence of beads or a feather and a headband that tipped Brown off?
I’m increasingly convinced the American voter SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO VOTE for the mere fact of acute ignorance. But go ahead … cast your vote for another racist.
And, good sir, are you ignorant enough to believe that marriages had that far back in one’s family would manifest themselves physically with all the stereotypical Native American traits Senator Brown implied they would (let alone her facial features)?
As a professional genealogist I will make you aware of several things:
-
In the U.S. Censuses taken every ten years since 1790, no one who wanted to blend into the white mainstream would give their ancestry on a census sheet.
-
Marriage licenses, birth records, and death records have never required one state the individual’s ancestry.
-
What a previous poster said when she referenced “this man is Native American”, “this man is not” should have put you right but you had to go on pressing this preposterous thing.
-
By in large the Native American population was only “encouraged” to have offspring with those of African American descent.
In President Warren Harding’s ancestry his great grandfather was 100% African American. Here’s the obvious IGNORANT question: Do you think Warren Harding “looked black??” And it’s more than likely that five other American presidents had black ancestry. Do the research. It’s right here at your fingertips.
My suggestion is that you know what your bloody talking about before you post. Brown kept prodding Elizabeth Warren with his “I’m not a student in one of your classes” statements. But she held firm and let him play the fool. Here’s to you Elizabeth Warren!
Last: I have done genealogical work for over twenty years. Easily one hundred people have claimed “my father said we had Indian ancestry”. Well I’ve never found any I could prove with those who claim it only because it’s impossible to prove when, if there was Native American heritage it was unfortunately covered up in order that the individual could mainstreamed into the white population. Somewhere in the early 1900s it became a badge of Patriotism I suspect to say one had “Indian Blood”.
In Elizabeth Warren’s case, I have no doubt there’s truth to her claim. The background (given the prejudice from her father’s parent’s family to the marriage) makes it even more viable a claim. But even the most clever of genealogists would never find it. It was purposely omitted. She has more information than most and given the area where she was raised I’m inclined to believe she has the Native American blood she claims she does.
Good gawd. To have to explain something SO obvious is exhausting.
I think a better argument against Warren is that she is being hypocritical - like a ‘Chickenhawk’ who is always advocating war but used legal loopholes to get out of serving, Warren advocates for affirmative action programs because of white privilege, then uses basically a loophole in the affirmative action guidelines to use the system to give her an advantage over other people that the law was actually intended for.
Even if she thought she was 1/32 Cherokee, it should have been clear to her that minority hiring practices were not designed to help people like her, and that if she used this dubious ‘native’ status to gain advantage she would be harming the people she claims to care about.
Aside from the specific charges against her, her actions also damn the program itself. If someone like Warren can use the rules to gain advantage over others as a ‘minority’, then the program is severely flawed.
She wasn’t hired due to any minority status. You knew that, right?
On what factual basis do you claim she gained any special treatment due to her ethnicity? :dubious: The same factual basis by which you claim to know her motivations for doing so?
Or, as it seems instead, are you also venturing into the same sort of alternate universe as magellan01, and for the same reason?
Again, the evidence that she used the system in this regard is wholly circumstantial and very thin. She didn’t have a habit of doing so; when given the opportunity to apply for minority programs, she didn’t do so. On the other hand, when given the opportunity to claim Cherokee ancestry in a wholly social context (i.e., a recipe book for Native Americans), she did make the claim.
So, no, she’s not a hypocrite.
It doesn’t matter if she actually received the advantage, if her actions were intended to gain her that advantage.
And I know some of you disagree that she was doing that, but I think that’s exactly what she was doing.
You “think” that’s why she did what, according to the evidence, she didn’t do.
Wonderful.
I respectfully disagree and recommend anyone read the article.
It’s about “ethnic shoppers” “falsely claiming to be American Indians when they’re not.”
It’s pretty clear that what Dr. Noley is saying is that if you have to search for proof one of your ancestors was Native American, then they weren’t.