You are making a positive assertion that she is lying. This claim requires proof.
Or are you saying that we should assume she’s lying just because you say so?
Burden of proof doesn’t work that way. You (and Scott Brown) claim that she is a liar. So substantiate it, or stop making the assertion.
The radio ads that Brown just started running about this issue are kind of pathetic and weasel-worded - they say things like “the Boston Globe reports that there are questions about whether Warren was hired by Harvard because of her claimed Native American heritage”. This is an absolutely true statement - the Globe has reported this on several occasions. The Globe has also done its best to answer the question, and as far as they can tell, based on (among other things) Fried’s statement, that the answer to that question is “No.”
If Brown makes me vote for a goddamn Harvard Law professor though, I’m gonna be pissed.
In fairness to Scott Brown, in fact it does NOT appear that he is judging Warren by her skin color. He is raising the accusation based on what is a pretty substantial body of doubt about her claim.
Of course she is. But if you call someone a liar, you do have to demonstrate that they are in fact lying. I’m not aware of any evidence she’s a Native American, but that would mean the claim is false - not that it’s a lie on her part.
Except there’s no evidence she got a job because of the claim, or that Harvard was aware of it when she was hired.
What is a pretty substantial body of doubt? Isn’t that just doubt? A pretty substantial body of evidence that the doubt is meaningful would be interesting. A pretty substantial body of doubt just tells me that coffee klatches across the state are in fine form.
And I have a hard time hearing “Professor Warren claimed she was a Native American, a person of color. And as you can see, she’s not.” as anything other than judging someone by their skin color. He looked at her skin and judged her to be a member of the social category considered ‘white’.
I don’t want to defend Scott Brown here, but I also grew up hearing stories about some long-dead relative who was supposedly a native American (well, native Canadian), and I remember growing up proudly declaring to my friends that I was 1/32 Indian, as though that meant anything to anyone.
At some point, maybe when I was 15 or 16, I realized that nobody gave a shit, and that as a white boy growing up in a white neighborhood with absolutely no tangible connection to my supposed native American roots, even speaking of such a connection was probably insulting to people like Tarwater. So I dropped the whole thing.
I can sort of see that if I’d applied for college a couple of years earlier than I did, I might have ticked the “Native American” checkbox out of some misguided desire to be unique, but fortunately I didn’t. I do have to wonder what the heck Elizabeth Warren was thinking; it should have been obvious to her by that point that the checkbox wasn’t on the application for people like her. Even if blood tests ultimately prove her 1/32 claims to be true, does it really help her case? Ultimately I don’t think a blunder she made when she was much younger really has a bearing on her ability to be a US Senator, but I don’t really buy the arguments that it wasn’t a blunder just because it might technically have been accurate.
What application?
Err, the “application” to be listed in the national directory of law school personnel.
(Clearly I haven’t been following this that closely. My bad.)
Moreover part of the reason many Native Americans are upset about this is that what Warren appears to have done is part of a much larger trend of white people falsely claiming to be of Native American descent which, quite understandably pisses off many Native Americans.
Nor is she alone. Kevin Costner, Johnny Depp, and Quentin Tarantino, amongst others have all claimed to be “part” Native American despite little evidence for this.
In fact, I remember one time in college one friend, who was a Lakota, started to tell another about being part Native American and the Lakota girl suddenly raised her hand and said “Let me guess, you had a grandmother or great-grandmother who was part-Cherokee.”
The first girl was flabbergasted and said “how did you know?”
Becky said, “because that’s what they always say. It’s never a grandfather, the grandmother or great-grandmother is always ‘part’ and they’re always Cherokee never anything else.”
Truth be told. I think most of the people claiming this aren’t being malicious or even know they’re telling an untruth. One of my mothers friends used to believe the same thing until she started doing some geneoligical research and found it to be false.
In most cases it’s just some family folklore. I suspect that was the case with Warren, though if she started asking to be listed as a “woman of color” I think she definitely stepped over the line.
Ironically enough, in many cases among African-Americans its used to cover up white heritage(for obvious reasons) and I suspect amongst many Southern white families, it’s used to cover up African-American heritage.
I understand what you’re saying in this post and I don’t really disagree. But if Warren actually thinks this story is true I can’t see a logical way to claim she stepped over some kind of line. She says she wanted to meet other people with Native American ancestry, and somewhat ironically, if she was successful in doing so someone else might’ve given her a lecture similar to the one your Lakota friend gave.
Even if this not correct, you cannot call her a liar without proving intent to deceive. If she is simply misinformed about her heritage by family legend, that is not a lie.
Oh, wait—you’re making the positive assertion that she is not a liar. So substantiate it, or stop making the assertion.:rolleyes:
Debaser is correct. She has made the assertion the she is Native American. If called on it, the burden of proof falls to her. It doesn’t get simpler than this.
This is a valid distinction, and one often glossed over here on the SDMB. But you’re incorrect about the burden of proof. SHE made the original claim, so it falls to her.
…and then she suddenly stopped being interested in meeting Native Americans just after getting tenure.
Also during her time at Harvard she made no effort to participate in Native American groups or causes as one would expect if she were actually interested in that culture.
False. I have asserted nothing. Can you point out my positive assertion in this thread?
And stuff your roll eyes please. Who else on this board has almost a 1:1 ratio of posts to rolleyes? If you feel you need to roll your eyes with almost every post, that says more about you than anyone that you’re responding to.
If you are having a hard time understanding this situation, then try to think about this message board and how we do things. If a poster calls another poster a liar here, who needs to cite that claim? Does the burden fall on the accused or the accuser?
Evidently it is even simpler than you seem to think.
It would be up to her to demonstrate she’s really a Native American. Brown goes further than disputing that claim. He’s calling her a liar, which involves two claims about his own knowledge: that she isn’t really a Native American, and that she knows she’s not really a Native American. I doubt he knows more about her actual heritage than anyone else does, and the existing evidence doesn’t prove she’s not NA. And he definitely hasn’t showed that she knows the story isn’t true. And in this thread we’re seeing another claim: that she was hired at Harvard because of her purported heritage in job at Harvard. None of those have been substantiated.
Since declarations of heritage are rarely tested, I think in this instance, she has the benefit of assumption and it is the camp arguing that she is not who needs to substantiate their claim.
How about as a white girl growing up in a state that was the (forced) homeland of the Cherokee tribe a hundred-odd years ago. I’ve seen estimates that half of the Oklahoma population has SOME Cherokee blood.
And you still have to provide evidence that she got hired by Harvard for it. That she noted her believed heritage in order to make social contacts with others who had NA blood is not proof that she was hired by Harvard because of it. You kind of have to believe that the major asset she offered the school was her ancestry. And having seen Warren’s work, both in her articles prior to the Senate run and in her campaigning, that was hardly true.
First off, in my native Texas, Scotch-Irish and Cherokee mixtures lie thick upon the ground, you couldn’t swing a cat in a room full of Texans without hitting one.
Second, the history of the Cherokee people is full of intermarriage with whites. By the time of the Trail of Tears, the leadership of the Cherokee Tribe was mostly people of mixed background, such as Sam Houston. How much Cherokee blood one has is very difficult to determine. What frequently happened was that various members of a family would claim more or less Indian heritage depending on the degree of their personal racism. People who were proud of such heritage tended to exaggerate it, people who wanted to identify as white would downplay, or even deny it.
Put baldly, Cherokee and white bloodlines are so intermingled, it is nonsense to attempt to speak with authority on “how much” Cherokee blood any given person has. (What most American assume to “look like” an American Indian are mostly related to the tribes of the Northern Plains, typically the “Sioux”, who had very little intermarriage with whites, compared with the Cherokee.) Notions like “one-quarter” Cherokee loses all meaning, few records were kept.
Edit: Sam Houston was “adopted” into the Cherokee Tribe, most probably he had no actual Indian ancestors.
If I accused you of being a child molester, could you prove that you aren’t? How would you go about doing that?