The adults left long ago
What Trump has unleashed, part 47 thousand.
Yeah. Haw haw. This is one of our Congressional Representatives, making racist jokes right out in the open. Perfect.
Tip Jar
What Trump has unleashed, part 47 thousand.
Yeah. Haw haw. This is one of our Congressional Representatives, making racist jokes right out in the open. Perfect.
Of course, the fact that there are two women there, and we have never had a woman president, though we have had a minority president, is not sufficient to note that this is a great thing. Carp at the white men, sure, but leave the women alone. They would still be very historical, and a great step forward.
Not to defend Liz Cheney, but “Pocahontas” as applied to Warren isn’t necessarily racist. For instance, if the intent is that she was a privileged white girl who got a kick out of thinking herself a native princess. In such a case, the moniker is in fact pointing to a racism of the more structural sort. Now, that may be incorrect and it may not be the intent, but the interpretation is plausible.
Just saying.
Nullius : “privileged white girl”? — have you bothered to read about Warren’s background, or does “girl” mean she made tenure at Harvard Law, so she always is/was “privileged, white and girl”? Or are you just being a dick?
I’m just a little older than LW, and this whole thing annoys me more than out-right racist/sexist rhetoric. My mother’s family had a similar “rumor” of a Native American female ancestor somewhere between the Illinois and Nebraska stages of the Twiss migration. No documentation, just something my grandmother hinted at. I, and I think, others of my generation were hardly woke, but thought it somewhat romantic, something to be proud of. Sounds similar to LWs understanding.
Um, I’m not making any claims about Warren. Hence why I even said, “that may be incorrect”. I’m merely offering an interpretation of the “Pocahontas” thing that isn’t racist.
Nullius, I think the point is that when Warren was a girl (round about some sixty-odd years ago), she was the opposite of privileged. She comes from a very modest, rural background, and got where she is through hard work of the sort few of us can claim ever to have performed.
If the narrative involves a “privileged white girl,” maybe it should be more about, I dunno, Liz Cheney? Now there’s a privileged white girl.
Can we all please quit using “girl” for Elizabeth Warren? I think that was part of what loren russell was getting at, though not the entirety, and seems to have gone unnoticed.
As for privilege, because I have a Ph.D., I am assumed to be a “privileged, cishetero, white ‘girl'”. I grew up in squalor and filth, suffered physical, emotional, verbal, and sexual abuse. I overcame my origins to get to a point where I could be presumed to be privileged. So everyone assumes that. In fact, as much as we often support the idea of poor women succeeding through education and good employment, the moment a woman moves from the status of impoverished without a future to someone who is shining in her field (or even someone who is educated, even if they are unable to break into their field), we suddenly forget we cheered for them to succeed and begin insulting them and calling them “privileged”.
Warren should not be required to defend herself. Several of the others on that stage with her have much more privileged backgrounds, and have the added advantage of being male.
People who look at that make up on stage and see only more of the same lack of diversity are managing to ignore the females on stage. For either Warren or Klobuchar to become president would be a truly historical moment that finally elevated an oppressed group into the highest position in the land, just as Obama did. It would likely make little practical difference to the lives of women, just as Obama mostly didn’t make things worse for the black population, but it would at least give us someone to point to with pride – see? A woman did that.
Of course, if a woman wins, she will go through the same crap Obama did, which will make it very difficult to govern effectively. In fact it will probably be even worse, because Trump has empowered the deplorables, and they will create havoc. Any ineffectiveness on the part of the woman president would be attributed to her being a woman, because, of course, no one can blame the white males who are creating terror around the country, no one wants to call them what they are – terrorists.
So, let’s please lay off calling everyone who has achieved “privileged”. Some people work damn hard to achieve that status.
Nullius @ 2 – but you can’t possibly think that’s how Liz Cheney meant it, can you? If I’m right about that, then what does your comment have to do with what Liz Cheney said? It wasn’t someone else saying something completely different, it was Liz Cheney recycling Trump’s repeated racist and sexist taunt. I don’t see the point of telling us that someone else saying it in a completely different context with a completely different intention would…be different. I think we can all be assumed to understand that.
Okay, now hold on. Could we stop assuming that “privileged white girl” is representative of my own view of Warren? That was a hypothetical perspective from which the “racist joke” can be easily seen to be not racist. I honestly don’t know how I could have made that clearer without being verbose and patronizing. Like, do I really need to include a disclaimer like, “The hypothetical views expressed in this hypothetical scenario by this hypothetical person are hypothetical and do not necessarily correlate to any actual views, implicit or explicit, of the actual writer”? Or are we adults capable of recognizing and considering the context of an utterance?
@Ophelia: As for whether I think Liz Cheney meant it one way or another, I honestly don’t know enough about the woman to judge. Aside from, ya know, the fact that her father is actually Emperor Palpatine. Given that and her political affiliation, I’d lean toward guilty.
Would someone else saying it (in a different intentional context) be read differently? I actually don’t think that’s the case for the majority. I believe that people are, in general, very prone to greedy (in the algorithmic sense) heuristics when interpreting speech, especially speech involving a tribal or ethical component. If anything, the fact that I immediately got jumped on for considering Warren a privileged white girl reinforces my conviction that people are terrible at treating things differently dependent on context.
The inability to recognize the relevance of context is a fundamental and pervasive problem. It’s one thing to state TWAW as legal fiction; quite another as physical reality. It’s one thing to quote a passage from Huckleberry Finn; quite another to use a racial slur. And yet, people consistently fail to distinguish mention vs. use or law vs. biology. Do you understand that context matters to meaning? Of course! You, however, are accustomed to parsing nuanced distinctions. The vast majority of people are most certainly not. When we call something out as racist/sexist/etc. in one context, that majority is prone to generalizing to all contexts. That’s why I think it important to endlessly bang on about such things’ not being contextually invariant.
Ok, that answers my question.
I get what you mean, but I think this particular example isn’t a good one for the purpose, because of Trump’s use and popularization of the taunt. Liz Cheney, being a compliant Republican and defender of Trump, can’t possibly have meant it in any other way than the way Trump always meant it, so saying it could mean something else in a different context just kind of clangs on the ear, like a cracked bell.
Shake hands all around, I hope.
Or it could be covertly racist with a reverse allegation twist.
In calling Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas, the speaker communicates two things simultaneously: an overt insinuation that Elizabeth Warren has committed a transgression of cultural appropriation, while simultaneously and covertly signaling the speaker’s own unimpeachable degree of whiteness in comparison to the sort of rural rabble that has putatively mixed ancestry.
Papito @10, that’s the way I took it. It’s the direct riff off Trump. In my mind the worst thing to be said about Warren in all this is that she believed and repeated family oral history without interdependently fact checking it first. Unwise if the first time she ever mentioned the story was as a Senator in her 60’s with Presidential ambitions. Entirely forgiveable when she’s done so all her life. In any event, as I understand it, the DNA test didn’t disprove her story, rather it suggested that the possible Native American ancestory was either further back or more ‘dilute’ in the purported generation. Hardly a unique or unforgivable situation for someone to find themselves in.
Rob, I grew up in the same part of the country as Warren, and we were also told we have Native American blood. My sister tried for years to validate it, because she wanted to get on the Indian rolls and get benefits. She wasn’t able to, and I was glad, because people raised white, even if they have non-white blood, have not suffered the things that these sorts of benefits were put in place to help redress.
Warren is not evil over this. I know some lefties who give her a lot of hell (PZ for one) over it, but it was an honest statement made honestly without any sort of malice or subterfuge intended. I for one think we should say let’s just move on.
iknklast, I agree (just in case my post implied otherwise).
Rob – your post did not imply otherwise (at least, not to me). I was just clarifying by example, since I come from the same general area that Warren did, and understand what she’s saying. I also suspect people like PZ (who did not come from that area) understand, but will play attack dog to get woke points.
I do not think DJT understands, but I don’t think he cares about cultural appropriation. He only sees a “perfect” way to smear Ms. Warren, without understanding the myriad nuanced ways in which this smear might be interpreted, depending on whether you care about the rights of Native Americans or wish the Native Americans would “go back to their own country” (as I have heard ignorant people propose).