Elizabeth Warren Ancestry Thread Part 2

Giordano said:
Double irony in regard to this thread: for most of their existence DAR actively prohibited African Americans/Blacks from joining. I am not certain what percent was required to invalidate one's application. However for many years in the South "one drop" black blood" (any black ancestry) was considered enough to define one as black legally and socially. Of course Warren would be considered without question Native American if this type of standard was applied to her!

This also illustrates how slippery, complex, and often erroneous definitions of race are. The central problem of course is that "race" is a meaningless term in genetics. The classical definitions of race do not match up with the actual science. Some alleles tend to be more common in some groups than others and this can be used as an approximation of ancestry. But there is enormous variation within each group, people outside that group may nonetheless share some of the same alleles as those inside, and the boundaries are very vague. Most people are a complicated mix of different ancestries. To try to say that having 1/4 some "race-related" alleles qualifies you as that race, but 1/8 or 1/16 etc. doesn't is meaningless as well as arbitrary; it simply doesn't work like that. The genetic data cannot be interpreted that way.
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This can get even weirder and sillier.

When Virginia codified the"one drop rule" with its Racial Integrity Act of 1924, intended to prevent miscegenation by outlawing any marriage between people of different races it was accompanied by Virginia eliminating any distinction between races except for "white" and "colored". This placed all people with any Native American ancestry into the "colored" group.

"White person" was defined by law as "... the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian; ..." [my italics].

However! :):):):):)

:rolleyes:

Yes. There was an exception.

"... but persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be white persons."​

But why? Funny you should ask.

Many of the landed and wealthy old leading families of Virginia liked to claim descent from ... you guessed it ... Pocahontas, regardless of how spurious the claim might have been, and were quite concerned that the new anti-miscegenation law might suddenly make them "colored", with all of the attendant social and legal disadvantages.

And it would be unthinkable for them to abandon their claims of descent from Pocahontas just because they wanted to screw over the blacks and the Indians without any effect on themselves.

Of course.
 
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quadraginta said:
This placed all people with any Native American ancestry into the "colored" group.
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An aside:

It was so long ago now that I forget the context*, but a friend of mine (African American from Richmond) once explained to me that "Charles City girls" were the best-looking in the state. Charles City County is southeast of Richmond, and was quite rural and socioeconomically depressed back then. According to his family and cultural lore, Charles City County was a place with lots of Reconstruction Era racial mixing among freed blacks, Native Americans (Powhatans presumably, aka, Pocahontas' people; maybe also Chickahominy), and whites.

According to my friend, when he was a teenager in the big city of Richmond, it was a status symbol among the boys to date a Charles City girl: African-American woman with light-to-cinnamon skin and light eyes, often green or turquoise blue. (*The context might have been us seeing a beautiful woman, him claiming to know what county she was from, and me asking how he knew that.)

Anyway, if there's any truth to his claims, this would have been evidence of One Drop Rule segregation still evident on American landscapes in the 1990s.
 
varwoche said:
I'm highly unimpressed by certain of the arguments that some of the more active posters have put forward. Your blatantly tribal approach to things, not just in this thread, serves as a prime example.
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Speaking of unimpressive arguments, I'm still waiting to see how you connect your premise to your conclusion.

The only conclusion I can reach right now is that you're using a different definition of the word "lie".
 
varwoche said:
Wrong. It cuts precisely to the point.

Do you agree it would be BS for us to address one another this way? Why? (I'm Caucasian, emanating originally from Africa of course.)
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Caucasian is simply a word for humans whose pelts are on the less pigmented scale of human pelts. It tells you nothing about their actual ancestry so I'm not sure why you are using it in this thread which is about ancestry?
 
Darat said:
Caucasian is simply a word for humans whose pelts are on the less pigmented scale of human pelts. It tells you nothing about their actual ancestry so I'm not sure why you are using it in this thread which is about ancestry?
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Or, indeed, why he uses African-American for anyone with African ancestry?

I feel like varwoche’s argument in this thread falls apart just under the weight of its own assumptions, misconceptions, and factual errors.
 
Darat said:
Caucasian is simply a word for humans whose pelts are on the less pigmented scale of human pelts. It tells you nothing about their actual ancestry so I'm not sure why you are using it in this thread which is about ancestry?
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:D (Ow, my ribs) I see you have a pelt Darat - a rather tabby one - but how can I put this...
 
Caucasians are from the Caucasus.

Georgians, Armenians, Abkhazians, Chechens, Southern Russians.

Any other definition I think is obsolete and just plain unhelpful.
 
theprestige said:
Hahaha not even close.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race

Where do you come up with these lies, Darat? Do you make them up yourself, or are they revealed to you by a higher source of "truth"?
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Your wiki link says:
In the United States, the root term Caucasian is often used, both colloquially and by the US Census Bureau, as a synonym for white.
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Then the word "white" is hyperlinked to this, which says:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_people
The usage of "white people" or a "white race" for a large group of mainly or exclusively European populations, defined by their light skin, among other physical characteristics, and contrasting with "black people", Amerindians, and other "colored" people or "persons of color", originated in the 17th century.
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Slightly off topic (but more on topic than weird flexing about the definition of caucasions).

My real main takeaway from this whole thing is that I was unimpressed that Warren took Trump's bait on this whole thing. After seeing an almost identical setup with Obama's birth certificate, she should have seen the setup for what it was. And THE major job for a democratic candidate in the short term is to be an effective candidate against Trump in a primary.

My misgivings were amplified a bit in the wake of this whistleblower issue.

Warren was being questioned by a reporter who seized on the Biden issue, and asked Warren something to the effect of whether she would think it were okay if her child accepted a position similar to Biden's son. She was caught off guard, hemmed and hawed and stuttered. It was not a powerful image.

I think Warren's policies and views are what i want in the White House. But she's not showing the backbone and poise that's needed to prevail in an election. If she falls for more obvious Trump tricks, if she stutters and can't answer a question in debate, all of that would make her look very weak.

It's weird that Trump's base seems to celebrate him being "not a politician" when his ONLY skill is spinning things with BS.
 
Darat said:
Caucasian is simply a word for humans whose pelts are on the less pigmented scale of human pelts. It tells you nothing about their actual ancestry so I'm not sure why you are using it in this thread which is about ancestry?
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Your Surrender is accepted
 
Cavemonster said:
Slightly off topic (but more on topic than weird flexing about the definition of caucasions).
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Weird indeed. Clearly Darat was referring to colloquial usage of the term which is "white people" and the whole point of his post was that the people who fall under that umbrella represent an enormous variety. People out here thinking that they're dunking on the dude's flawed anthropology dissertation or something and I'm like y'all need some more constructive hobbies.

Cavemonster said:
My real main takeaway from this whole thing is that I was unimpressed that Warren took Trump's bait on this whole thing.
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Boom. Even the part about Trump baiting her with the million dollar bet was an obvious farce. She HAD to know that if she could prove her Native ancestry 1) he wouldn't pay, 2) he'd spin it to make her look like a fool, and 3) his base wouldn't care. She needs to be smarter than that.

Her second gaffe was that – although she was confident enough in her ancestry to actually take the test – she had very little understanding of what Native folks feel about such things. The backlash from the left should've been obvious too. How could she have been so clueless about Native people while she's engaged in this public dust-up over her own Native ancestry? Years ago she should have sought the council of Cherokee elders on this.
 
The Shrike said:
Weird indeed. Clearly Darat was referring to colloquial usage of the term which is "white people" and the whole point of his post was that the people who fall under that umbrella represent an enormous variety. People out here thinking that they're dunking on the dude's flawed anthropology dissertation or something and I'm like y'all need some more constructive hobbies.
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No. Darat tried to force an oversimplification in order to win an argument. He can't unilaterally decide what simple definition applies to someone else's use of a complex term, just because it's rhetorically convenient for him to do so. Nor can he rebut someone's legitimate use of the term in reference to ancestry by asserting that it simply means something else instead.

Yet he attempted both those things.
 
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Where I am, "Caucasian" in reference to race just means "White"; it's employed because some people feel embarrassed about referring to white people as a race, given history.

When the word "Caucasian" is used in other contexts it's usually about geography, particularly the mountain range of that name.

I think it's disingenous for Americans, at least, to pretend confusion as to what "Caucasian" means when used in context of race. It means white people. What that includes or excludes is up to the reader of whatever they're reading it on, and it depends on the other choices available.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Where I am, "Caucasian" in reference to race just means "White"; it's employed because some people feel embarrassed about referring to white people as a race, given history.

When the word "Caucasian" is used in other contexts it's usually about geography, particularly the mountain range of that name.

I think it's disingenous for Americans, at least, to pretend confusion as to what "Caucasian" means when used in context of race. It means white people. What that includes or excludes is up to the reader of whatever they're reading it on, and it depends on the other choices available.
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But...but...there’s Internet Points to be scored!
 
theprestige said:
Once again oversimplifying a complex topic. Why not just tell the truth about what Caucasian means, Darat?
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You're aware that scrolling down through the link you provided will land the reader at Usage in the United States and describe Darat's interpretation at length, right?

Here are a couple of gems from that section:

Besides its use in anthropology and related fields, the term "Caucasian" has often been used in the United States in a different, social context to describe a group commonly called "white people".[71] "White" also appears as a self-reporting entry in the U.S. Census.[72]

The Supreme Court in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) decided that Asian Indians were ineligible for citizenship because, though deemed "Caucasian" anthropologically, they were not white like European descendants since most laypeople did not consider them to be "white" people.
 
The Shrike said:
Boom. Even the part about Trump baiting her with the million dollar bet was an obvious farce. She HAD to know that if she could prove her Native ancestry 1) he wouldn't pay, 2) he'd spin it to make her look like a fool, and 3) his base wouldn't care. She needs to be smarter than that.

Her second gaffe was that – although she was confident enough in her ancestry to actually take the test – she had very little understanding of what Native folks feel about such things. The backlash from the left should've been obvious too. How could she have been so clueless about Native people while she's engaged in this public dust-up over her own Native ancestry? Years ago she should have sought the council of Cherokee elders on this.
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Pretty my my thoughts as well. As far as I'm concerned, she doesn't appear to have been bullied into doing it, as many people seem to think. It's always been clear to me that it was Warren's attempt at shaming Trump by getting one of his attempts to insult her to backfire; like "Hey, he said if I did this, he'd donate lots of money to charity, and now he's not doing it - this is gross." The problem is, Trump can't be shamed like that. It just doesn't work, because he refuses to hold himself to any kind of moral standard and has a history of doing things like that (not paying workers, using a charity as a slush fund, etc.). He simply doesn't care. Warren didn't realize that until she'd already done something incredibly foolish, but hopefully she used the whole thing as a learning experience.
 
The Shrike said:
You're aware that scrolling down through the link you provided will land the reader at Usage in the United States and describe Darat's interpretation at length, right?



Here are a couple of gems from that section:



Besides its use in anthropology and related fields, the term "Caucasian" has often been used in the United States in a different, social context to describe a group commonly called "white people".[71] "White" also appears as a self-reporting entry in the U.S. Census.[72]



The Supreme Court in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) decided that Asian Indians were ineligible for citizenship because, though deemed "Caucasian" anthropologically, they were not white like European descendants since most laypeople did not consider them to be "white" people.
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Yes. My point is that you have to scroll down, because there's a lot meaning to unpack. It's not just "simply" what Darat claimed.

Darat tried to oversimplify that whole long history and complexity of the term, for spurious rhetorical advantage.

ETA: Using darker fonts makes your posts difficult to read on some readability settings. Rather than emphasizing important information, you're pretty much making it invisible.
 
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