Race is forever and always a fluid cultural construct.
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“In a time when white privilege was quite valuable” - it seems still to be doing quite well, as I consider the ferocity with which CRT is attacked. Years ago, I did some readings in Critical Legal Studies, and found there what I would say was an early iteration. It struck me as the most plausible.
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I don’t doubt that Littlefeather’s claims of native American heritage are dubious at best, but what did the author intend to accomplish with this article?
In one paragraph, the author says that Littlefeather may have been delusional, and in the next, implies that Littlefeather was deliberately committing fraud for financial gain. This seems slimy.The juxtaposition of she may have had an unshakeable delusional belief with the implication that she was deliberately lying makes it seem to me like the author isn’t just trying to advocate for the truth.
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Charles Curtis (January 25, 1860 – February 8, 1936) was an American attorney and Republican politician from Kansas who served as the 31st vice president of the United States from 1929 to 1933 under Herbert Hoover. He had served as the Senate Majority Leader from 1924 to 1929. A member of the Kaw Nation born in the Kansas Territory, Curtis was the first Native American and first person with acknowledged non-European ancestry to reach either of the highest offices in the federal executive branch.
Question 1: how many people would consider his portrait out of place in a gallery of other men of significance from the same time period
Question 2: how many people knew we had had a Native American VP before the press needed to “well ack shually” the significance of Harris’ election
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The DNA markers for indigenous Americans are pretty well defined, but I don’t think the data base is strong enough to identify to Yaqui or Apache.
My father always (sort of) claimed some distant indigenous ancestry. We were all pretty sure it was another one of his fairy tales. He died before we could show him the 23 and me report that showed he was whiter than white without a drop of non-European ethnicity in the last 500 years. Even his Y chromosome hails from whiteness.
My mother, on the other hand, is teaming with all kinds of DNA markers from different parts of the DNA world including Ashkenazi Jewish, Coptic Egyptian and Central Asian. None of this changes her cultural identity which is “little old lady from rural Oregon”.
Having indigenous DNA is way different than having an indigenous cultural identity.
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This belies the original bunch of commercials about these tests which basically said that as long as you have 5% of something you can start wearing a kilt.
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Imposter Syndrome is having persistent feelings of self doubt despite accomplishments, training and education. The sufferer is authentic yet can’t believe their competence and success is legitimate.
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You are correct, I am sorry, and I just cannot wrap my head around this somewhat “new” concept, which I think of as another type of personality disorder. I should have referred, in the sense that we have been discussing this topic, to it as “Racial Imposter Syndrome,” describing what people like Rachel Dolezol (now, Nikechi Amare Diallo), Jessica Krug, Hilaria Baldwin, and others…
I found another term for it, too – Identity Hoaxers. It is a pretty crazy place, this world.
It is never my intent to deceive, but I do make careless mistakes now and again.
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As a society, we’re fighting over whether someone who feels they are a different gender from their birth gender can claim to be a different gender, with the left saying “yes”. Biological sex is far more definitive than race or ethnic origins. In fact, for all but a few people, biological sex is unambiguous.
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May want to check out:
And if you have NetFlix pull up the full episode…
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I knew you knew. Have dealt with it myself. Apologies if my response was abrupt.
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Pushing and testing limits and boundaries is something that I have always believed in, and whether they are physical boundaries, or existential ones (as in “what is self,”) but it is not an easy process. Since I believe that there is really one one “race” (the human one), I am only left with the ethnic origins and biological sex. Ethnic origins are pretty infinite; biological sex in a social world, is a little more ambiguous than what you present, and this is just my humble opinion. I am not a geneticist or expert in the human genome – way above my pay grade…
Not at all abrupt. No problem. I do think I (we) need to think about how we use “labels.” My god, if we could get rid of all these unhelpful diagnostic codes, and trying to pigeonhole all our “quirky” personalities, our world might be more accepting of differences and we might cut ourselves (and others) a lot more slack.
But, n-o-o-o-o-o. Medical Insurance Companies had to invent ICD codes to prevent having to pay out claims. And ‘Coders’ and ‘billing clerks’ would have to find other jobs. We need more researchers, helpers, and healers – and fewer paper-pushers – in medicine.
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Damn. I’m only 3% Cherokee, so no kilt for me!
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If you treat people as avatars of a symbolic group, then you’re part of the problem.
I’m some tiny percent Scot, but the kilt of the surname I can trace my ancestry back to appears to be 1) designed in Australia (although approved by the Scotland registry?) and 2) kind of ugly.
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Oh boy, I love opening TPM to read about the moral imperative of identity politics!
A very interesting graphic.
But note that those are merely the “excess deaths,” presumably mostly due to COVID. Even the “normal” death rates, however, are measurably higher in the red states due to homicides, suicides, poor health care, neglect of safety precautions, drug overdosing, and so forth.
Ruy Texiera’s prediction that immigration and youth would bury the GOP demographically turned out to be laughably off the mark. First, youth don’t vote, damn them; but every time someone turns 65 and gets his Medicare card in the mail, he seems to transform into a MAGA Republican who will crawl over broken glass to vote for instantiation of fascism. As for Hispanics, they are turning more and more Republican, partly due to social conservatism brought on by religion (and Hispanics are becoming more and more evangelical) as well as the machismo cult. Perhaps also the unlovely trait of many immigrant groups to pull up the boarding ladder once they get their citizenship.
As well, I believe Trump and Republican strategist have succeeded in politically mobilizing many groups that heretofore never voted: the abysmally ignorant and apathetic, those living off the grid, the undiagnosed mental cases, and borderline criminals and con artists living in subcultures previously unconnected with electoral politics. (J6 and QAnon provide lots of evidence for this theory).
The red state death rates would seem to suggest an offsetting tendency of Republicans to die off faster.
But before we can determine how all this will play out long term, the GOP may drag the country into ruins.
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Not always.
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Well, maybe we’re exceptions (I am, being over 65), but I think the rule generally holds.
Back in the '70s and ‘80s, the elderly tended to be the Democrats’ core group. They were old enough to have clear memories of the Great Depression, and they were grateful for things like Social Security and Medicare.
Now, the elderly are late Silents and early Boomers. It’s not just that they feel, many of them, entitled to it. They feel entitled to it and “those other people shouldn’t get it.” They feel entitled to it, and those in Florida (which has the highest percentage of elderly) vote for Rick Scott, erstwhile Medicare fraudster who is now trumpeting a plan to cut social security and Medicare. By a species of magic thinking, they believe it won’t apply to them.
I can’t tell you how many of my age contemporaries I’ve known, not redneck yahoos but fairly savvy professionals and erstwhile political moderates (many of whom worked in the federal government), who have flipped out and now buy into conspiracy theories that conveniently align with the GOP agenda.
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