Disturbingly absent from the analysis of Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown’s rebuke at last week’s debate of Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren’s claim that she has Native American ancestry is any reference to the racially insensitive nature of his reproach. After noting that “Professor Warren claimed she was a Native American,” he added pointedly, “And as you can see, she’s not.”
Which raises the obvious question: which of her facial features alerted Brown that she has no Native American blood coursing through her veins? Surely, if she possessed whatever tiny fraction of one’s DNA must trace back to an indigenous tribe before he or she is deemed to be Native American, she’d have shiny, jet-black hair or a tan complexion. Or was it the absence of beads or a feather and a headband that tipped Brown off?
For a fellow who, like so many other Republican senatorial candidates, has been distancing himself from Romney’s recent stereotyping of 47% of the populace as freeloaders, Brown’s remark was downright Romneyesque. Or worse.
Indeed, the comment reeks of the stereotyping of a bygone era. Did Brown observe, upon meeting Senator Joe Lieberman or Al Franken or Dianne Feinstein, “Funny, he doesn’t look Jewish.” Somehow, though, it’s okay to say it about Native Americans.
While the truth of Warren’s representation on a couple of job applications that she has Cherokee and Delaware Indian ancestry may be relevant to the issue of character, Brown’s remark reveals something about him: with respect to the sensibilities of vulnerable groups, he – like the guy at the head of the party’s ticket – just doesn’t get it!
Noting the troubling nature of Brown’s remark is not to pass judgment on Warren’s as-yet unsubstantiated claim of some degree of Native American heritage, however well taken her point that kids don’t ask parents to document the information they pass on about their ancestry. It does, however, underscore the right’s deep resentment of the social safety net and affirmative action, as well as the Eurocentric preoccupation with ethnicity that fuels the birther debate, a miasma that should have dissolved long ago, and legislation like Arizona’s “show me your papers” law.
It also underscores the pitfalls of attempting to classify race and measure ethnicity in the first place. Those attempting to determine Cherokee heritage, for example, run into claims from De Soto onward that “Cherokees are light skinned,” and that the “Dawes Rolls” adopted by the Cherokee Nation as the official registry by which claims of ancestry are determined excludes many individuals with significant Cherokee lineage.
Brown’s remark represents the flipside of our distressing history of classifying anyone with a fraction of non-Caucasian ancestry as on-white, as if a drop of non-white blood contaminates the pool. In the seminal case of Loving v. Virginia, for example, in which the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage, the Commonwealth had classified as a “white person” anyone “who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian,” a notion which, to one degree or another, lives on in many circles today. The irony here is that, when minorities represent a threat to racial purity, we’ve attempted to employ precise scientific measurements, but when minority status is perceived to carry an advantage, it’s fine to judge a book by its cover, as did Brown.
Even worse than Brown’s offensive comment, however, is that we seem oblivious to its insensitivity. In a day when 24/7 cable and Internet news outlets wring every drop of newsworthiness our of a candidate’s utterances, surely Brown could have been taken to task for his offensive remark.
Jay Sterling Silver is a law professor at St. Thomas University School
of Law in South Florida. Many of his pieces can be found in the
National Law Journal and the Huffington Post.
Thank you for a wonderful perspective on this disturbing issue. It needed to be said. I feel the Republican Party has become so disreputable, particuarly when the Republican legislators are taking steps to take away the peoples voting rights and are willing to say anything in order to win elections. I feel we no longer have a two-party system in this country. It’s a disgrace and a tragedy.
Almost everyone whose ancesters were in Oklahoma have Indian Heritage. rember Will Rogers. According to definition an American Indian is a member of an organised tribe. Many are of Indian heritage but never went to the paperwork required to prove their heritage. In fact most don’t because they’re not interested in the benefits they will recieve if they prove up. So the fact she has’nt proven up does not mean she is not of Indian heritage but only that she wasn’t interested in participating in the benefits. However, she is still allowed to be proud of her heritage. As for Senator Brown, he’s is about to bite off more thhan he can chew. All Indian tribes are very close to coming together on this.It could very well release a fury among native American people thats been simmering until it boils over.
I agree. In fact your point that Brown’s comment was racist seemed so obvious to me that I didn’t realize until you said so that so few others noted it. I’m also from Oklahoma, and also have about as much native American blood in me as does Elizabeth Warren (almost everyone who has deep roots in Oklahoma does), and like her we just took the heritage for granted and never demanded that our Grandparents produce papers to prove it.
Also, my son has more native American blood in him than I do (from his mother) and is on the Chickasaw rolls, with full documentation. But he also has blond hair and blue eyes. Would people like Brown say that because he doesn’t look like Tonto from the old “Lone Ranger” shows, he therefore doesn’t deserve to call him by that name?
I, belong to the chickasaw tribe as well. Governor Anatubby (He takes full credit, I forever discipline myself for taking credit and do my best to remember the virtue of humility) has drastically improved the tribes health care, housing, employment, education, nutrition, well being and safety especially among senoirs. Also he provides storm shelters landscaping among other amenities. The tribe is still very clanish, I’m from the Love Clan, you also have the Imotochys, Keels, wolf and wolfe.
There are many people within both the Jewish and Native American communities who “don’t look native” – they just look real European but that’s no tell-tale sign that they don’t belong. It’s just part of how things go when peoples backgrounds are many and varied – and hey, that’s ok. Earlier on, before I became more understanding of the issues I used to be doubfounded myself when I discovered that there are alot of us that just don’t look like how we think we should look or normally do look – yeah, blond hair, blue eyes that kind of thing and you think woh! they don’t look trad but really that’s not their fault. We can’t just invert this thing that those white supremacists do by saying now you’re not brown enough so you can’t possibly be…! It’s just not fair or right cos we all have our respective histories that we as individuals did not have any part in creating – that’s the generational twist.
It’s like when you see people in the Jewish community who are brown and look really traditional, well you can’t help but notice how traditional they look and that’s great to be appreciative of our “brown roots” despite the centuries of exile and having been displaced from our own tribal territories. Why do you think Hitler got all riled up? He hated it when he saw that people could be proud of being different, proud of a different ancestry to what he considered ‘acceptable’ or ‘civilized’, basically proud to be brown. He had the same ideas as many of the European pioneers who came to the USA had about native Americans – that to have a heritage which was brown and not from ‘white’ or Teutonic/Norse stock was just base and inferior – less than human. It stems back to the nineteenth century notions of ‘civilization’ and ‘advancement’ as synonymous with being ‘racially pure’, empire-centered and gravitating around how many dynasties you can bolster and thereby somehow ‘advance your humanness’ to the so-called pinnacle of achievement or endeavour whilst using every other racial or cultural grouping who didn’t conform to this notion as fodder to work your mines or plantations or if it got too complicated, to just incinerate them all, thereby eradicating every trace of their existence. I’m sure you know what I mean. Yep, the people of Israel, including the diasporic communities the world over have been on the receiving end of this horrible stick big-time and are still getting it now. We know what it’s like along with our native American brothers and sisters. The miscegenation idea will be used time and time again to ignore the fact we still exist, whether it’s stark obvious or not. They even wanna try and make us look culturally European so that all that Middle-Eastern brownness can just fade away!. That’s how bad this insideous color-blind racism is. To eliminate one brown race after another and then to eliminate all brown cultures so that everyone will just blend in with AngloAmerican secular society! How boring!!! You see, many in the Jewish community still know and understand that in spite of centuries of uprooting and exile, that the people are still not going to go away like those racist white-supremacists hope we do. They’ll try alright (the neo-supremacists incognito) to convince as many people as possible that color is non-existent now and everyone is the plain same – just all no color – just like AngloAmericans. This is disgraceful and is the persistent colonialism of eradicating our unique cultural history and the truth of who God made us to be. Eventually they will want to do this to native America, if they’re not already doing this now.
So we have to stand against this machine and say NO! to miscegenation of our hearts, our culture, our history. I’m of mixed ancestry myself and just because I have only part of my heritage in Israel, doesn’t make me any less a part of this nation in God’s eyes than someone who is full-blood. BTW, there are hardly any of those left now outside the traditional territories because of all the social changes within, around, and outside of the community in the diaspora. The same can be said of native America – but so what? really – culture and one’s heritage and one’s ability to identify with and appreciate it, doesn’t and shouldn’t depend upon “blood quantum”. After all, the notion of classifying people according to blood quantum only lends to another type of racism because it artificially imposes boundaries of inclusion/exclusion, superiority/inferiority upon those who fit either one side or the other of such boundaries. This is contrary to many indigenous peoples ideas of how tribal or nations membership is not exclusively decided on having descendency or ‘a certain amount to qualify’. Both the nation of Israel and many native American groups actively include “grafting in” of members either through marriage or initiation as a legitimate form of extending membership to those from outside and by no means is this traditional way of bestowing membership a frivolous or superficial “anything goes” one.
I stand with Elizabeth in solidarity cos I too know how it feels.
Cheers Stan and Langon – let’s keep it going! This site’s amazing when we all get together and make it what it ought to be! Cos that’s the nature of Tikkun.
My heart goes out to you too Jay because you’re my brother – thanks for a wonderful article. We need more good community lawyers like you who understand these issues.