FOX NEWS is the MEDIA OUTLET FOR WHITE SUPREMACISM

[_Jersey Girl]

mikwut -

If your parents and grandparents told you during all of your young and formative years that you had a Cherokee ancestor, would you have (1) believed them, or (2) possibly repeated it to anyone else? Is it reasonable behavior to have done so?

I would have believed them and shared the information with others. I would have shared it with friends and I would have passed it on to my own children.

At what point can it be responsibly claimed by someone else that you might be ‘lying’ about it?

It can only be claimed as a lie when one has discovered truth and continues to repeat untruth.

How would you rectify that situation with certainty? How could you have proven or disproven the claim?

If I am not mistaken (and I could be) Warren did do a DNA kit with specific results that included a tiny percentage of NA blood ties. Right?

So in my own family history, stories were passed down to me as well, and on to my own children. As it turned out through my genealogical research, all the stories turned out to be true. All of them. :-)

I discovered more details and answered quite a few pending questions. I also discovered a family member that I never heard about. He was my GGM's first child, born out of wedlock in a poor house in Glasgow. I discovered why he might have been born in a poor house and discovered other details about him.

When I came upon this information, my family story was adjusted to accommodate his part of the story and was shared with every other living family member that I have.

That's what you do with the information. Who discovered the additional details about Warren's family? If she knows about this as surely she must, has she denied them?

If she's ignored them, maybe what looks like ignoring to us is really Warren processing the fact that her family story is significantly different than she thought it was. And, she is doing this under a magnifying glass with a schedule that must be heavier than any of us here could have.

Don't we all deserve time to process new information and adjust?

I think she needs time to mull it around. She can't tell us what she thinks about it until she knows for herself what she thinks.

[_mikwut]

Hi Doc,

Ok. Let's say she fibbed about being a Cherokee. Compare and contrast that against Trump and where do you stand on her candidacy?

- Doc

Thanks for asking. I have been baffled by the other posters assuming I am defending Trump by offering a criticism of Elizabeth Warren. It is maddening. All I did was defend the what I consider ridiculous notion that Trump is a white supremacist. Be that as it may I tangentially brought up Elizabeth Warren as being alluring to me due to her ideas she is offering but this ancestry issue did concern me. It still does.

I have said I didn't vote for Trump and I am not voting for Trump so I just don't understand why the issue I make of Elizabeth Warren has to be contrasted with Trump. Shouldn't every candidate be looked at with a critical eye? That is all I am doing.

Concerning Trump, I don't believe he is a white supremacist. I do believe he is divisive, obviously and we are already divided as a country so it is not the healthiest situation. I blame the media a great deal and hyper rhetoric. It is unfortunate.

mikwut

[_mikwut]

Jersey Girl, canpakes and Gunnar,

If any of you read my post stating my position about Elizabeth Warren you would respond to it and not just keep repeating talking points about the ancestry nonsense. Just as the article stated that I linked above, we are talking about a United States Senator, a previous Harvard Law School professor here. Not just some kid whose parents told her some family Indian blood stories. As I mentioned from my own experience practicing law, there is no way Elizabeth Warren did not understand that ancestry for tribes is not based on DNA testing, it primarily is based on tribal affiliation and living. There is very accessible ways to find out if you have true tribal relations of which you could affiliate. As I stated lawyers necessarily and ethically have to learn from clients if they have tribal affiliation in order to properly represent them. My classes in law school, which was not Harvard, included this fundamental information. Am I to believe a professor from Harvard is somehow remiss of this? This is what makes her DNA test so serious for me. She still went through with that after knowing the distinction. None of you have answered that. Do I just throw my actual life experience out the window here?

mikwut

[_canpakes]

there is no way Elizabeth Warren did not understand that ancestry for tribes is not based on DNA testing, it primarily is based on tribal affiliation and living. There is very accessible ways to find out if you have true tribal relations of which you could affiliate.

Warren did not claim tribal affiliation as commonly defined by Native Americans who actively choose to affiliate. She claimed an ancestor who was believed to identify as Cherokee.

Whether or not Warren chooses to affiliate with a tribe in that legal sense does not deny the possible existence of an ancestor who was, by every contemporary or dated definition, Cherokee, nor denies support for the plain reality of Warren's 'family relative' claim.

You keep wanting to (a) build a particular box around her that she did not build, then (b) chastise her for your placement of her within your box, as if it were her doing.

Anyhow, I have some questions for you in my previous post that I'm curious how you'd respond to. ; )

[_Jersey Girl]

mik I only responded to the article that you posted that you said expressed similar to your concerns.

I haven't spent much time reading your comments on Warren, except that I did read where you covered the requirements of her law degree. I don't recall if that was on this thread.

I like Warren's decisiveness. I like that she has "a plan for that." I like that she typically delivers something more concrete than the usual candidate. And I like her enthusiasm.

mik if she played shell games with the truth then tell me why you think she did that.

[_mikwut]

Jersey,

Why do I have to gleen into someones motive and mind when I have enough proof to know she did do what I have argued? I don't know her exact why. I do know she played fast and loose with the truth that is silly to think she didn't understand what she apologized for until that late in the process.

mikwut

[_mikwut]

canpakes,

Tribal affiliation is what is required to claim you are Indian, that's according to the very tribes we are discussing. She claimed and was presented as the first Harvard law professor of color because of her incorrect designation of heritage. I have already argued she of all people knew this distinction. She is not an Indian (person of color) by either measure.

mikwut

[_canpakes]

canpakes,

Tribal affiliation is what is required to claim you are Indian, that's according to the very tribes we are discussing. She claimed and was presented as the first Harvard law professor of color because of her incorrect designation of heritage. I have already argued she of all people knew this distinction. She is not an Indian (person of color) by either measure.

mikwut

And she does not claim this now, nor did she claim in the past that this was the entirety of her ethnic makeup.

How about those questions I had for you a few posts back?

[_Gunnar]

It is not at all obvious to me that Trump is not a racist or White Supremacist. I can think of nothing less obvious than that. Quite the contrary! It is incomprehensible to me how any fully rational, informed person can fail to realize his racism. Whether he actually is or not, he certainly has no objection to racists and white supremacists concluding that he is one of them, based on his rhetoric, and feeling empowered and encouraged by that. He has a history of racial discrimination in his housing units, for example, and having to pay heavy damages and fines because of it. Mikwut at least agrees that Trump is very divisive. I don't think one can reasonably deny that his rhetoric resonates heavily with the most racist among his base supporters, whether that was Trump's deliberate intention or not.

[_EAllusion]

canpakes,

Tribal affiliation is what is required to claim you are Indian,

No it's not. In fact, nothing thing is required to claim you are Indian aside from your ability to make an assertion. It's required in a specific legal sense that you are assuming Warren claimed, even though there is no evidence she did. Warren was claiming (partial) Native American status and identifying as such based on ancestry (derived from family lore) because vast swathes of America believe that genetic descent is one in the same with claiming you are part of some ethnic subgroup.

Right this very minute, people are getting back their 23andme results, finding out they are x% Irish, and going on to claim they are Irish despite no actual lived ties to Ireland or Irish culture. Some of them are going to go on to do performative Irish things like get super into St. Patrick's day because they are now "Irish." This is ordinary of Americans. As it turns out, they also do this with respect Native Americans. This is a shame, because there are really good reasons to think that people shouldn't claim to be Native American unless they have real tribal affiliation.

For what it is worth, when I've heard Native Americans I know talk the genetic testing craze leading people to discover and claim they are a particular ethnicity, it drives them nuts because they think it is going to lead to more people claiming to be Native American when they're not in the sense they care about. They think this common American idea of ethnic belonging is pernicious and that genetic testing companies are feeding into it.

It's not surprising that Warren behaved the way she did here. Having an understanding of legal recognition of tribal affiliation doesn't preclude one from also believing that genetic descent justifies a claim of ethnic belonging. You'd hope Warren would know better, but it appears she didn't at the time. Your insistence that she did and engaged in a campaign of deception for a motive that doesn't even make sense in its historical context is just not a good argument.

I have been baffled by the other posters assuming I am defending Trump by offering a criticism of Elizabeth Warren. It is maddening.

You are the one who has invited the comparison when you engage in a false equivalence between Donald Trump's vicious racism and Elizabeth Warren's historical insensitivity to Native Americans. Acknowledging one is worse than the other is meaningless when you also declare that one must believe both are terrible examples of racism that create serious consequences for how we view them or neither do. You are the one who collapsed very serious distinctions between the two that mediate what we should call and how we should deal with them.