If you were looking for a really bad analogy, you found it. That aside, yes, it is relevant. A candidate voluntarily places herself in the public eye. They know scrutiny is coming. And when voting, character is something that many voters look to. If she did game the system by checking a box she was entitles to check, that would speak poorly of her. Brown, thinks that’s what she did, so he’s calling her on it. Burden falls to her. She made the original claim, i.e., being of Native American ancestry.
As far as the lying accusation, as I’ve stated, I think that goes to far. But that doesn’t absolve her from showing that she is Native American and did not game the system. Or the degree to which she did.
If she thinks that her Native American ancestry is relevant now, she needs to put up. Otherwise, she needs to go back in time and stop talking about it 20 years ago. Which she did.
If Brown thinks she’s gaming the system, he needs to put up. Otherwise, he needs to go back in time and stop talking about it a few weeks ago.
Waiting.
Edit: calling an analogy bad isn’t actually an argument. If you want to explain why the analogy is bad, go for it.
I think what’s confusing some people is that there are multiple claims going on, with multiple standards of proof, and multiple burdens of proof. Let’s break 'em down.
Elizabeth Warren said she’s Cherokee. This claim was made a long time ago in an environment with basically no standard of proof. The standard she chose to use was family oral history. If she knew more about Native issues, she wouldn’t have done that. It was a bad move, but a pretty minor one.
Elizabeth Warren says she’s Cherokee. If she’s making this claim currently in the political arena, she ought to offer some more evidence of the claim. But she’s not, so there’s no burden of proof on her.
Elizabeth Warren used her supposed ancestry to get hired. Folks in this thread and elsewhere are making this claim. The burden of proof for this claim is on the person making it.
Elizabeth Warren lied about her ancestry. Again, if someone thinks she lied (as opposed to thinking she relied on a dubious source of information and was mistaken), the burden of proof is on the person accusing her of lying.
The only burden she could possibly have currently is item #2. Since she’s not making any absolute claim about her ancestry, but only about her family oral history, there’s no burden of proof on her.
I believe it is disingenuous to portray the matter as something she initiated.
As far as I can see, Warren made no such assertion in any public context–it formed no part of her political identity–until an issue was made of the concept by her opponent.
Without her involvement, Harvard brought out the years-older directory listings, trying to make themselves look ‘better’ in terms of minority hiring. There’s no evidence that the directory had anything to do with her being hired; I imagine Harvard just had somebody comb the records of all past and present faculty to come up with whatever scraps of ‘minority’ presence they could to counter ‘PC’ claims against them.
Then Scott Brown seized on the notion–apparently deciding to call her a liar on the basis of nothing, really.
Then Warren responded.
So whose “claim” is all this about, again? Who is trying to make political hay?
Moreover, it’s a completely mundane matter anyway. Nobody, including Warren, thinks that some small fraction of Native ancestry (absent official tribal enrollment) confers any special status or ability on her. It is ridiculous and embarrassing that this is what Scott Brown’s people are staking so much of their effort on. And that’s before the antics of his staff.
I used to respect Brown, think he came across as largely a decent guy, consider this race as one of the better ones nationwide, in the sense that the constituents in question would have no cause to be ashamed of the result, whatever it was.
HA! So if a candidate did something 20 years ago, or MORE, say like, maybe, potentially skirted his duties in the National Guard, that should be of no consequence? What an interesting take on character.
How about if tit was 2 years ago? Eight? Twelve? 19? What’s the magic cut-off date prior to which whatever a candidate did becomes irrelevant?
No. I’d rather not waste time arguing the degree to which an analogy is unapt, when an analogy isn’t even needed. You, of course, are free to think it the bestest, shiniest, truthiest analogy in the history of analogies. Plus if you don’t see the gaping flaws in it, I doubt stating the obvious will sway you anyway. So, feel free to pat your bad-ass analogy-making on the back to the cows come home.
It depends on what the candidate did, of course. If a candidate acted on a bit of family lore in a trivial fashion, that’s one thing. If a candidate kidnapped and murdered his prom date, that’s another. It’s up to you to decide where using family connections to avoid military service falls on that continuum.
Clearly you’d prefer to waste time saying stupid shit about it. Enjoy.
I can certainly see why many Native Americans are upset at what she appears to have done either deliberately or inadvertently did.
I remember one Native American saying he found all the “pretend Indians” kind of amusing and suspected that in many if not most cases involving people from Tennessee, Texas, Oklahoma, etc. if they checked hard enough the stories started up to explain why they has a dark-skinned ancestor and that it was more likely they were of African descent, but someone way back decided that it was better to be part Indian than part-black.
Similarly, something like %10 of all African-Americans think they’re of Native American descent, but in reality in most cases someone decided it was better to invent a Cherokee great-grandfather than say “great-grandma got raped by a white man.”
Both of these dynamics almost certainly occur. But as I said before, there are also some pretty good reasons to suspect that a lot of white-looking folks have a female Cherokee somewhere back around 150-300 years ago.
Whether that has any relevance at all depends on what you’re talking about. If you’re talking about getting recognition from a tribe or from a federal program or from an affirmative action program, that’s one thing. If you’re talking about curiosity about your ancestors and a desire to connect with other folks interested in similar ancestry, that’s another thing entirely.
I get why lots of Natives get irritated at white folks bragging about their Cherokee grandma, totally ignoring what it means to be Cherokee and never having visited a reservation except to go to the casino. Such behavior is obnoxious. At the same time, if someone isn’t bragging–if they’re just thinking about family oral history–then they’re doing something blameless and wholly human.
A third explanation now? Wow. Maybe you’re eyes have rolled so far back in your head that they’re now just spinning around like a wheel in a slot machine. I guess they always said that if you keep making a face it might get stuck …
I’m quite comfortable with my pace of reading thank you. And, oh great, another roll eyes. Let me ask again, do you think that does anything but make you look dismissive and condescending to those that you disagree with? Do you expect anyone to have a reasonable debate with you when you treat those that you’re debating with such contempt?
Lets try this. Here’s what we know:
He’s accusing her of being a liar, and then not saying another word to substantiate his accusation.
2)You feel that merely the fact that he has made this accusation is sufficient to shift the burden to her.
How is that a reasonable viewpoint? Why wouldn’t accusations just start flying around everywhere if this is the way it works?
What makes you think she’s the exception amongst all the white who believe they’re “part Cherokee” when they really aren’t?
Mind you, I don’t think she lied in the sense the sense of making claims she knew to be false. I’m just wondering why you’re so certain that she really is part Cherokee despite never apparently seeking out any of the several Native American groups at Harvard?
I’ll freely admit that I wonder if this discussion involved Sarah Palin’s husband, Todd Palin, whether we’d be having the same conversation.
I.E. if he was running for Senator and people had looked into his claims of being of Native American descent and it turned out there was no more evidence for his claims than of Elizabeth Warren’s if we might see the people attacking her defending him while the people defending her would be screaming about him falsely appropriating someone else’s ethnic identity.
Turn this back around on you: what makes you think that most white folks who think they’re “part Cherokee” really aren’t? Freeman Owle was the dude who talked to me about the large number of Scots-Irish men with Cherokee wives, and how they hid their wives during the Trail of Tears. Do you think he was wrong?
As for what you wonder, do you really think Bizarro World arguments are ever remotely interesting?
In addition, the Native authors I’ve read who get pissy about the “My grandmother was a Cherokee princess” tend to focus on the real problem: the folks saying these things tend to have no connection to modern natives and a fanciful and borderline racist idea of what modern life is like for Indians and are just trying to get a bit of romance-by-association into their lives. The technical truth of whether there’s any Cherokee ancestry there isn’t what’s interesting.
In this case, Warren sounds like she (and her family) were going for that borderline-racist romance-by-association. Not cool. But not the same thing that Brown is accusing her of.
Completely irrelevant as Brown is asking Warren to prove a positive not a negative. If I claim I am part Native American and Brown accuses me of lying I can show by records that my great-great-grandmother was Cherokee. Can Warren do the same?
Speaking as a card-carrying liberal Democrat hippy, I would bet everything I have that if it was indeed Todd Palin in Elizabeth Warren’s position, 90% of the Dopers arguing for accepting her claims would be saying the exact opposite of what they are trumpeting now.
Some of our most vocal liberal Dopers are among the most hypocritical people alive today.
(That said, if Todd Plain and his entire family were savagely mauled to death by a rogue grizzly bear under the sway of a deranged Inuit shaman, I would laugh, and sing and dance with glee)
If Todd Palin were attempting to use a false native american status for personal gain or if he were trying to act as a spokesperson for them, you bet I’d have a problem with it. If he’s telling family stories around the dinner table, why the fuck should I care. When you have some evidence that Warren used her heritage unethically as opposed to checking a box on a form that was used to make a phone directory, come talk to me. In the meantime, I need to go talk some sense into every woman who thinks she was Cleopatra in a past life as that’s about as important as this moral crusade y’all are on.
The stories she and her family have apparently told over the years are fairly specific. In my experience, most of the people who talk about their great^3 grandmother who was a “full-blooded Cherokee”–my family included–don’t offer much in the way of details about her.
In fact, Warren says that her father’s family objected to her mother’s NA heritage, which led them to elope. It wasn’t just a point of trivia in her family, as it is in mine; in hers it was apparently kind of a big deal and a significant part of their story.
Of course, it could still be crap, for reasons laid out by plenty of others in this thread. But it seems plausible enough to earn her the benefit of the doubt.
But leaving aside the general nastiness and the blatant racism of Brown’s actions–isn’t he overplaying this? Is this really the road he wants to go down? Does he think this is going to appeal to undecided voters, or fire up his base without firing hers up just as much?
