Apparently, Elizabeth Warren got a DNA test

[conuly]

This, I feel, is at best a waste of money and at worst a complete tactical error.

Obviously the Trumpers don't really care about her DNA. They just want to mock her in the most offensive way possible. They're not going to believe her (or even remember that they didn't bother to believe her) any more than they believed Obama about his birth certificate. Responding to them just lends them credibility and dignity that they thoroughly don't deserve.

Instead, she ought to be focusing on the people who matter, which is, those of us who might ever vote for her. And I don't think any of us care either. A great many people who aren't Native still have some Native American ancestry. Big deal! What she ought to do is mea culpa about calling herself Native American when she isn't tribally enrolled, which would show that she took the time to educate herself, which I think we all do care about, at least a little more than whether or not one of her distant ancestors was maybe Native American or not.

Comments

[conuly]

So in general, stunts like this lead legitimacy to those kinds of claims (and bring us back to that "one drop" rule, I guess).

As I understand it, with blood quantum rules in effect in (some? many?) tribes, there's no "back to" for certain tribes to begin with.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Blood quantum rules are in effect with most if not all tribes, which can have some results that are horrible and often intended by the federal government which may have put them into law/statute in the first place.

One drop rule is different than blood quantum, and Show Boat can explain it better and more ridiculously than I can right now. cf. Jim Crowe.

[conuly]

I'm always interested in learning more.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

So, the one drop rule states that if any ancestor was any fraction African, African. In Show Boat a singer is outted as Black which would make her marriage with her white husband illegal; he has her prick her finger and sucks it so he can state to the law that he has at least a drop of Black blood in him. Now, that's musical logic, but reality was just as counter-factual; plantations quickly had some number of people enslaved that were the very pantone number as any 'white' owner, because they were cousins.

There were counties where shaking down prosperous Creoles to pass them across the color line was a thing. It's not unheard of courthouses burning to clear up inconvenient family relationships when someone became important.

There have been children that had their school records stamped with Colored because otherwise (in Jim Crowe) the teachers wouldn't know because it wasn't a visible thing but a social one.

[ioplokon]

Yes, thank you - they're really not the same thing. I suppose the confusion could come from thinking of the Cherokee Freedmen situation, which was fairly widely publicized & did involve both...

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Yes, which is where the quantum rather goes against history in a well known way.