Making THAT speech in front of THAT portrait either shows vicious racism, utter ignorance of history, or complete disorganization in the White House — or, my thought: all three.
For those who are about to defend the indefensible (again), let me anticipate your comments:
1. Yes, it is racist and a slur to refer to someone as “Pocahontas.” How do we know? Because the Navajo there said so. Native Americans typically refer to themselves in terms of their tribes; referring to “Indians” broadly is like referring to “Europeans” — inaccurate at best and insensitive and dismissive at worst. Deliberately insulting someone by calling them by a REAL PERSON’S NAME is insulting to everyone involved.
2. Even if there was any justification for Trump’s slurs on Warren (nope. See below), using a commemoration of war heroism to make this statement was a profound insult to the American war heroes there next to him.
3. The Boston Globe and others investigated the claims that Warren benefited from a false claim of Native American blood in detail. They found: a. There is no reason to think that she was lying. Her family told her she was part Native, and that’s true of a lot of people in Oklahoma, thanks to the Trail of Tears (initiated by Andrew Jackson, incidentally, the guy on the painting behind Trump). So the worst you can say is that Warren believed her family. b. Warren obtained NO advantage in getting her positions or her degree by referring to her ancestry. None. One of the people who selected her for tenure said categorically that it wasn’t even considered, and she never once brought it up. So this is a demonstrably false accusation in the first place.
4. It is PROFOUNDLY insulting to have Andrew Jackson’s portrait so prominent here. Jackson, like Trump, showed profound contempt for the rule of law, and defied a Supreme Court order outright in order to kill more Native Americans. He was known as “Indian Killer.”
Making THAT speech in front of THAT portrait either shows vicious racism, utter ignorance of history, or complete disorganization in the White House — or, my thought: all three.
For those who are about to defend the indefensible (again), let me anticipate your comments:
1. Yes, it is racist and a slur to refer to someone as “Pocahontas.” How do we know? Because the Navajo there said so. Native Americans typically refer to themselves in terms of their tribes; referring to “Indians” broadly is like referring to “Europeans” — inaccurate at best and insensitive and dismissive at worst. Deliberately insulting someone by calling them by a REAL PERSON’S NAME is insulting to everyone involved.
2. Even if there was any justification for Trump’s slurs on Warren (nope. See below), using a commemoration of war heroism to make this statement was a profound insult to the American war heroes there next to him.
3. The Boston Globe and others investigated the claims that Warren benefited from a false claim of Native American blood in detail. They found: a. There is no reason to think that she was lying. Her family told her she was part Native, and that’s true of a lot of people in Oklahoma, thanks to the Trail of Tears (initiated by Andrew Jackson, incidentally, the guy on the painting behind Trump). So the worst you can say is that Warren believed her family. b. Warren obtained NO advantage in getting her positions or her degree by referring to her ancestry. None. One of the people who selected her for tenure said categorically that it wasn’t even considered, and she never once brought it up. So this is a demonstrably false accusation in the first place.
4. It is PROFOUNDLY insulting to have Andrew Jackson’s portrait so prominent here. Jackson, like Trump, showed profound contempt for the rule of law, and defied a Supreme Court order outright in order to kill more Native Americans. He was known as “Indian Killer.”