Nov 2023 Mod notice:
There may be other, more specific, threads about some aspects of US politics, but this one tends to act as a hub for all sorts of related news and information, so it's usually one of the busiest OTC threads.
If you're new to OTC, it's worth reading the Introduction to On-Topic Conversations
and the On-Topic Conversations debate guidelines
before posting here.
Rumor-based, fear-mongering and/or inflammatory statements that damage the quality of the thread will be thumped. Off-topic posts will also be thumped. Repeat offenders may be suspended.
If time spent moderating this thread remains a distraction from moderation of the wiki itself, the thread will need to be locked. We want to avoid that, so please follow the forum rules
when posting here.
In line with the general forum rules, 'gravedancing' is prohibited here. If you're celebrating someone's death or hoping that they die, your post will get thumped. This rule applies regardless of what the person you're discussing has said or done.
Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Being nameless is no surprise, given the time span. How many of us can rattle off our family tree going back twelve generations? But, we know what we've been told about the general shape of it, whatever obfuscation, exaggeration, gloss, blanks or *cough* undeclared dalliances (paternity: not always as advertised! Also the adopting of children not your own, but still family and calling them yours... and so on) come with.
DNA evidence is great. But, it also comes with holes. To even have as much verifiable Amerindian DNA as Elizabeth has after so many generations is still very strong proof. Because you can lose whole chunks of DNA in the lottery that is division and recombination. Some members of the family will show it more, some less (and I don't mean by looking — I mean the DNA).
If you are a kid born from a child of that lineage, congrats: you are mixed. But, also a testament to the strength of the woman who kept the baby and brought it up to become an adult. However, the genetic trail? A thing. The identity you choose? <shrugs> That's complicated, yes.
But, we've all of us got mixed race (and rape) in the background. Just as we have acceptance, adoption, generousness, truly loving couples and horrible arranged marriages of convenience and strife. It's better if we don't forget it.
Edited by Euodiachloris on Feb 7th 2019 at 4:28:50 PM
Does that corollary really apply in this specific situation?
‘Too hot to handle’: Pelosi predicts GOP won’t trigger another shutdown The House speaker discusses Trump’s border wall, impeachment and the 2020 presidential campaign in an exclusive interview with POLITICO.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/07/pelosi-trump-government-shutdown-1154355
Edited by sgamer82 on Feb 7th 2019 at 9:26:27 AM
![]()
![]()
![]()
Oh my god. She is between between 98.44% and 99.9% NOT Native American. She has between .1% to 1.56% Native American ancestry. She doesn’t know the supposed ancestor’s name. None of her family grew up connected to that culture, let alone a specific tribe. Regardless of your opinion on the rest of this issue, that is not “so much” DNA or “very strong” proof. And you still clearly didn’t read the article I posted, which discusses why the entire DNA argument is misleading.
Harris’ past actions and current proposals are far worse than Warren’s idiot gaffe here. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be disappointed in Warren for how she’s handled this.
Edited by wisewillow on Feb 7th 2019 at 11:39:23 AM
Wise, check out the sheer amount of DNA all humans still share... with chimps and bonobos.
The supposed racial differences that are, in fact, retained family-tree mutations aren't solid chunks that always leave a footprint in any of us. Because there's always a chance that you won't inherit the telltale marker that screams "definitely from Asia" from the "definitely generic human" one... from an Asian ancestor who happens to also have one half of that section of strand being generic as hell. And, a lot of "definitely generic human" is also "yep: hominin".
That's why they come in percentages.
Edited by Euodiachloris on Feb 7th 2019 at 4:49:59 PM
... what the hell is that supposed to mean?
Edit, since you revised: for God’s sake, read the article I linked on the last page.
And for additional context:
Edited by wisewillow on Feb 7th 2019 at 11:50:53 AM
I believe he's saying that 99.9% of White and Native American DNA is identical anyway.
The differences are....Skin Deep
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Feb 7th 2019 at 8:43:14 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.99% of all human DNA is identical. That's not really an answer to this issue.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Even when they've elaborated their post makes no sense,the comparisons with chimps are loaded with Unfortunate Implications
have a listen and have a link to my discord serverHas anyone seen those commercials for ancestry testing where someone think their family was, say, Italian, and it turns out that their family is mostly from, say, Eastern Europe? I see it as something like that. The only difference is that there was a grain of truth from the family story.
Stuff like this can’t be that uncommon.
Edited by megaeliz on Feb 7th 2019 at 11:58:15 AM
Shit, I'm apparently part French since one of my great-grandparents was supposedly half French and half Vietnamese (I prefer not to think about how that happened). I'm not going around identifying as French.
Though maybe it would explain why I love French food and wine so much...but who doesn't?
Disgusted, but not surprised![]()
Just because it’s common doesn’t make it okay. And there’s a big difference between thinking your family is Italian when it’s Eastern European (although, uh, your ancestors could have moved to Italy from Eastern Europe...)
Then I read Vine Deloria Jr.’s book Custer Died for Your Sins, which punctured a hole in the genealogical fabric I’d inherited. In this classic book about the American Indian Movement, Deloria wrote about his time at the National Congress of American Indians, during which white people came through his office almost every day claiming they had a “Cherokee grandmother.” I recognized that my fond belief in a Cherokee ancestor was, in fact, a cliche, and I mostly let go of this false narrative about my family’s heritage.
...
For many white Americans, there is something appealing about being a “little bit Cherokee”; some observers call it the “Cherokee Syndrome.” In the 2010 census, more than 819,000 Americans self-identified as Cherokee ― but the combined population of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes (the Cherokee Nation and United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee in Oklahoma, and the Eastern Band of Cherokee in North Carolina) amounts to fewer than 400,000.
Material benefits are part of the allure. The ability to assert a Native American identity on official forms can lead to result in access to additional resources. For instance, in the late-nineties, a company owned by House Majority Leader Kevin Mc Carthy’s (R-Calif.) in-laws won more than $7 million in no-bid and other federal contracts at U.S. military installations and other government properties in California based on a dubious claim of Native American identity by Mc Carthy’s brother-in-law. At Harvard Law School, Warren was celebrated as the first “minority” woman to receive tenure. This was based on her own claims of Native American identity on employment forms, although she and Harvard Law have denied her identity had anything to do with her promotion.
Then there are the more ephemeral appeals to claiming Cherokee identity. “I believe that there is a retreat from white guilt that is happening here,” writes University of Texas anthropologist Circe Sturm in her book Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity. “Whiteness is responsible for indigenous dispossession and the lack of societal connection that characterizes modernity,” she said in an interview. Sturm calls people who claim Cherokee identity without prior tribal affiliation “race shifters,” who are seeking connection to an identity outside whiteness. Claiming an indigenous identity, however flimsy the evidence, relieves some of the discomfort of being a white settler.
Race shifters are commonplace in American history; perhaps the most infamous recent example is Rachel Dolezal, who claimed in a 2015 interview that she’d been born in a “tepee” and spent parts of her childhood hunting for food with a “bow and arrow.” These claims turned out to be false. Sturm argues that race shifters associate Indianness with a set of values and a feeling of community belonging that is “the near opposite of the anomic individualism ... associated with the modern condition of whiteness.” Dolezal, like other race shifters, was able to get a paid position with the NAACP using yet another racial identity. Claiming Native American identity means that some white people have access to material resources and the emotional distance from a legacy as an oppressor.
When Elizabeth Warren took the bait of her political rival by using a DNA test to “prove” her claims, she endorsed a way of thinking about race, DNA and Native ancestry that reinforces white supremacy. The notion that an individual can discover their tribal affiliation through a DNA test reinforces the white supremacist notion of “race” as a biological trait tied to a specific gene, discoverable from saliva. It’s the same idea at the core of the Ancestry.com advertisements that you’ve surely seen on TV. This simplistic view of how genetic markers work strengthens retrograde notions about about “blood quantum” and race.
Research by Kim Tall Bear, a professor of Native Studies at the University of Alberta, has established that there are no genetic markers of Native ancestry. In her book, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Sense of Genetic Science, Tall Bear observes that tribal membership is a legal category, not a genetic one. She points out that it is impossible to disentangle individual genetic information from the constellations of family relations, reservation histories, tribal rules and government regulations in which genes are formed.
When the question of using DNA to establish Sen. Warren’s lineage first emerged in 2016, Professor Tall Bear wrote about the fallacy of using genetic markers to establish tribal membership. “Because we are all genetically related, there are no tribe-specific markers, i.e., no Cherokee, Pequot, or Lakota markers,” she wrote. So, Warren’s claims that she has a “gene” that proves she is Cherokee is false, but her championing of this idea to score political points reifies a particular set of ideas about Indianness and biology.
...
No matter what her DNA test says, Warren is no more Cherokee than I am, which is not at all. But by claiming a Cherokee identity when she has none, she is propping up white supremacy.
“It’s not about what identity you claim,” Tall Bear said in a 2016 interview about the issue, “it’s about who claims you.” Senator Warren isn’t being claimed by the Cherokee nation, and that’s what matters.
Edited by wisewillow on Feb 7th 2019 at 12:05:09 PM
Generally, I'm mostly Scottish and Irish....and 1/8th Cherokee. I was really confused by this but apparently my dad did know and had a large number of artifacts from where he did business with his ancestor's tribe as well as gifts. He also never bothered to mention it while alive.
Which means that it wasn't passed to me.
And that's a shame.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Feb 7th 2019 at 10:06:09 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.![]()
![]()
Again: Warren herself specified in the DNA test video the difference between having the DNA and claiming a cultural heritage, and that she claims the former but not the latter. So why the hell does everyone act as if she did? I would get it if she hadn't said anything about it, but she was very specific and on point about it.
It's like someone saying: "You know, I once had a small part in a play, but I don't claim to be an actress." And is then forced to apologize for supposedly claiming to be a star.
I am on the "that makes her even more qualified" track because if the Republicans are so set on smearing her, they must be really afraid of her politics and her ability to make them reality and if THAT is the worst they could find on her after digging into 40 years of history, she must be remarkable clean or remarkable good in covering her tracks.
Edited by Swanpride on Feb 7th 2019 at 9:16:35 AM
She put herself as American Indian on her Texas bar registration.
Moving along- no, it’s not disqualifying, but I think she’s handled this badly. I don’t have a front runner yet because every Dem candidate has substantial flaws and policy issues. (Yes, every candidate is flawed; I’ll vote for whoever wins the primary; I just am not rooting for anyone in particular yet).
Edited by wisewillow on Feb 7th 2019 at 12:23:48 PM
So our solution to the media reducing every political contest to who has the juiciest dirt is to simply let them get away with it and only run candidates who are 100% scandal-proof? That's a defeatist attitude if I've ever seen one.
Edited by Fighteer on Feb 7th 2019 at 1:05:04 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I might have an ancestral grandmother or something who was raped by a slaveowner. That doesn't make me part-white.
EDIT: okay, seriously?
Edited by PhysicalStamina on Feb 7th 2019 at 8:15:22 AM
i'm tired, my friend