Jophiel wrote:
Imaginary claims of Native American ancestry aren't really like "I have black friends", anyway. "I have black friends" is set up as a deflection of racism claims by acting as though, since you know some black guys, you can't possibly be racist and therefore your racist comments shouldn't be criticized. Even if true, it's meaningless: it would be like me making a bunch of Spic and Beaner remarks and saying "It's cool, I married a brown chick".
Claims to Native American ancestry are more about trying to sound exotic or spiritual. People in the 60s claiming ancestry weren't saying "Fuck you, Redskin go eat some maize -- nah, it's cool, I'm 1/32 Cherokee" they were saying "My great-great grandmother was a Cherokee princess and that blood helps me commune with Mother Gaia and see the Great Wheel in all things....". The fetishization of an ethnic group can certainly be a form of racism but the goal is far different from "I have black friends".
The goal is more or less identical. It's about saying "Yeah, I'm white, but I'm not like those other white people who don't understand you. I'm on
your side. Really! Honest!". It's about joining a group that you don't really belong to. It's about claiming an association that you don't really have. In the same way that "having a black friend" doesn't mean you know what it's like to be black, to grow up black, etc, claiming NA ancestry doesn't mean you know what it's like to grow up on a Rez, be part of a tribe, etc.
Both involve the motivation of wanting to claim a kinship to something via a pretty tenuous connection that doesn't actually provide sufficient connection to warrant mention. And yeah, in a lot of cases the "I'm part NA" is used specifically to handwave away behavior that might be insensitive or racist. "It's ok for me to use this offensive term, because I'm 1/256th Cherokee!". Same deal IMO.
Quote:
I suspect Warren believed she had Native American blood because she was told that and just never had reason to question it and liked the idea of being "exotic" in some fashion.
Which is fine. Checking the NA box on an application is not. That's the point here.
Quote:
Plus, it's not really improbable for someone whose family was in the northeast same as basically every European has some tenuous claim to royalty if you go back far enough. For that matter, if you want to believe that she maliciously wrote it into a college entrance form because she thought it'd help then I can't prove otherwise. Pretty unlikely though that she picked it up to shield herself from accusations of racism in a "But I have black friends" manner unless you have examples of her saying things that needed such a shield.
I didn't say maliciously. I even stated that it's possible she had no specific motivations at all. However, it's pretty unlikely that the fact that she did put this information down didn't help her at some point (possibly several points) in her life. She can claim she was blissfully ignorant of the fact that by putting that down, she would have an easier time getting accepted to schools, an easier time getting a job, easier time getting advancement in said job, etc, but that's ignorance on her part, and frankly it's hard to believe that she just wasn't aware of this. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that a person who is a prominent member of a political party with an ideology that strongly revolves around identity groups, benefits for minorities, fights for the rights of said groups, etc, that person would have to have a serious mental block to not realize that by putting a NA heritage down on paper, she's reaping the very rewards she and her party fight for in the first place.
Quote:
But, and let's be honest here, Republicans don't actually care about Native Americans in this way at all.
False. Unless by "in this way", you mean "we pity them and feel we must make up for past wrongs". Cause yeah, that's not how we feel people should be respected. Frankly, we find that to be disrespectful. But that's an ideological difference, I suppose. But it's absolutely not about liking or disliking. It's about the belief that the best way to prove you "like" a group isn't to give them free stuff. That's usually what you do for people you don't like, but want to get to like you. It's disingenuous.
Quote:
I mean, let's try to act like we're really concerned about Warren's claim by using a racial slur and then ignore things like Native Americans being attacked by dogs and sprayed with chemicals as they try to protect their ancestral lands from being torn up for oil pipelines. If Republicans gave a fuck about Native Americans, there's a whole long list of things they could be addressing.
I've raised those issues on this forum exactly as many times as you have (prior to this one reference). It is interesting that you only seem to care about such things when they serve as a distraction from another topic being discussed. In what way does any of that have to do with the wrongness of Warren claiming NA ancestry on application forms? Not at all, right? Doesn't have any effect. But you bring it up anyway.