the thing about the NYT is is you look like mamdani you have to be accountable forever for everything including a form you filled as a teenager and didn't do anything wrong with but if you look like Trump laws you have sworn a public oath to uphold do not apply to you at any point in your life
"If You're White, You're All Right" has been the tune of the white supremacists and the elitists for generations.
I had a Canadian friend who was always asked: where are you FROM? And her parents and grandparents were born in Uganda, and before that, her family was born in a part of India which isn’t India anymore. What answer should she give, besides “Canada”?!
no class analysis please
compare his coverage to eric adams. compare adam's coverage to trump's.
Twice as good for half the credit?
Then Trump should be accountable for everything he did as a teenager and what he did in the 80s
SCOTUS Justice Brett Kavanaugh had a moment of bad judgement as a teenager when he jammed his penis in a girl's face against her will, but he's a Caucasian-American so nobody gives a crap.
Oh yeah thats the thing about NYT and not the thing about Murica always being a fascist empire
It's not *just* his pigmentation. It's also the audacity to act on a sincere conviction that capitalism is less important than human dignity. They use the same tactic for Elizabeth Warren, who apparently is not allowed to mention her Native ancestors because most of her other ancestors were white.
Not the same thing. Warren has been proven by Cherokee Nation genealogists to have no Cherokee ancestry and was asked by the Cherokee Nation to stop claiming she did and not to take a commercial DNA test, because doing so promotes belief in eugenics based identity for Natives by non-Natives.
She took a DNA test and it proved that she has a Native American ancestor, which was the full extent of her claim. The Cherokee Nation took issue with the DNA test because it gives weight to the lie that "Nativeness" derives from DNA rather than community, so she apologized.
She specifically claimed Cherokee Nation for decades, when the Cherokee Nation asked her not to take a DNA test she ignored them and took Trump's bait. Her "positive" marker for a Native ancestor was less than the margin of error. She has no ties to any Native Nation personally or culturally.
Actually the DNA test is clear and does back up an Indigenous ancestor, but that doesn't make her Native. All of us who go back >7 generations would get similar results. We have 256 direct ancestors going that far back. Singling one out for a "family story" to use in politics was silly and harmful.
Nancy Reagan was a descendant of Matoaka (Pocahantas) do you think of her as Native American?
I don't think of either of them as Native American, because they are not. On the other hand, I also don't think white people should feel like they need to keep it a secret if they happen to have any non-European ancestors.
Warren portrayed herself as Native American while on staff at Harvard. She did the DNA test because of Trump's taunting. In an effort to get under her skin, he continued the repulsive WHITE AMERICAN BULLSHIT of making Native identity a joke. Warren played into it.
That's for sure! He even went on to brag that she "fell into his trap". I didn't realize she said she WAS Cherokee rather than just vaguely having a very distant ancestor who happened to be Native. I stand corrected.
The only defense that she has is she is among many who do this. I feel badly for the Cherokee Nation constantly having to correct the record for the claims. It persists forever with well-known fakers like Elvis.
I do too. I remember when total ignorance about Native history & culture was the norm for settlers. It was enforced by public education - when I was in school, some Indigenous kids were still in residential schools, and we didn't know. I hope to keep learning and appreciate those who keep teaching.
Yep. There is no Native person in the US or Canada who is not touched by boarding schools. Either they had to go, their parents, like my mom had to go or their grandparents or great grandparents went.
You need to listen to @weyodi.bsky.social and to Cherokee geneologists.
Doing my best. I think the only disagreement here is what the DNA test actually showed, which is unfortunate because it never should have happened to begin with.
For me the real issue goes back to her time at Harvard where she identified herself as Native without ties to any Native people in her life, and did not reach out to any Native people or organizations campus. It seems very opportunist.
I didn't realize that. That goes pretty far beyond noting that a single distant ancestor - one person out of 256 or more immigrants - happened to be a local.
The published DNA test was from a company that based it's metric for Native DNA on a group of 31 individuals from Mexico & South America, is questionable. That her published test showed .2% which is the testing companies stated margin of error throws the results further into question.
Thanks for the extra info. Maybe I'm trying too hard to be sympathetic because I trust Snopes and liked her comments in 2007 about challenging evictions. My dad's family goes back just as far and has a similar "family story", but it would never occur to me to make any kinship claims based on that.
I agree with your broader point (Trump can use slurs while Warren can’t get away with repeating something she was told in good faith as a child), but the Warren thing is much more nuanced than that. It’s very common for white families to believe in some long-lost Native ancestor who never existed.
That's true, but it was very common for early settlers to find an Indigenous wife. It's very likely that any settler with mostly European ancestors going back 5+ generations in NA has *some* Indigenous ancestry. The question is whether that makes any difference to who we are, and the answer is no.
I’ll put it this way. I’m descended from French, English, and likely Spanish colonials. We had this myth in my family too. My DNA test came back 100% not “Cherokee Princess”. It’s a story we tell ourselves to absolve ourselves of the guilt of genocide.
I doubt that's the case for everyone. Most people wouldn't describe the discovery of a distant Indigenous ancestor through a DNA test as being (or not being) a "Cherokee princess", for example. And having a distant Indigenous ancestor does nothing to absolve us of the sins of our European ancestors.
It surely isn’t the case for everyone, but real cases of people who got fed the Cherokee Princess story as family lore ever turn out to have substantial genetic ties to indigenous groups. And as a rule they have zero Native cultural or community identity. That’s the entire point of the lore.
Some people bullshit themselves some fake Indigenous ancestors. Other people remember they happen to have real Indigenous ancestors. That's why DNA is not a valid measure of Indigenousness. I believe my family's genealogy but won't test my DNA because it doesn't matter. I know who my family is.
Right, and unless you have known close family members who are indigenous, you’re not indigenous and it doesn’t matter. That’s what Elizabeth Warren didn’t understand. And it’s sad that legacy media used this to cut her down rather than open a dialogue about this phenomenon itself.
I agree with that. I would like to see a deeper understanding of how families came to be in the era when almost all settlers were male, but I also don't want to see settlers fantasizing / romanticizing these relationships or claiming Indigenous identity because of them.
All I know is their needs to be a complete ban on posting news from the nytimes
If by NYT you mean America, then hard agree
Privileged white guys who get jobs handed to them at elite newspapers just straight up don’t understand that most of the world doesn’t fit into the 4 neat little checkboxes that their racist great grandfathers designed 100 years ago.
Most people in the Middle East are considered white because in 1915 a Lebanese guy named George Dow said “if I’m not white than Jesus wasn’t white” and the 4th Court of Appeals was like “damn, we need racist pseudoscience reasons to explain why he’s right now.”
And of course, George Dow never would have had to argue that if “being Caucasian” wasn’t suddenly made the basis for citizenship in the 1900s due to racists. People should be able to self-identify AND belong here. I can’t fathom thinking the world is so simple as to not understand that.
But, of course Trump gets a pass for, at 79, using a term that anyone who’s spent more than 5-minutes in NYC knows is pejorative, and we all know he’s never read Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice…
Maybe not, because it's an open question as to whether or not he can read, but I presume that if there is a racial invective or slur, he knows it by heart. I'll bet that when he was in the Gulf, he kept saying to himself "man, this sand n-----s are really rich."
a man with a self confessed drinking problem is running the military right now where is the outrage? his mother publicly rebuked his behaviour but to criticize the other (the validity of Harris's teen job at McD) they will dig into the way back machine for anything to question.
The thing about the Times is when you look like mamdani you are not owed any privacy even as a teenager while filling a confidential form for college but if you look like Jordan Lasker your identity must be protected even as a grown man while sharing stolen data for the purpose of neonazi propaganda
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ukdu...
White men ages 18-50 are treated like boys by the whole of society whereas BIPOC tweens and teens under age 18 are treated like adults with no privacy.
The thing about the Times is that the owner is a gutter variety racist who has active contempt for anyone who isn't white. And that's the entire story behind the NYT and editorial decisions. A gutter variety racist makes them and so he chooses gutter variety racism wherever he can.
I've seen this claim about Sulz a few times and I completely buy it as an inference to the best explanation but are there also more direct grounds for the conclusion? (I haven't paid a ton of attention to whatever public utterances he's made.) very plausible regardless ofc
Time in the Midwest definitely brought out the worst (whiteness) in him.
I didn't know that. And yet I did.
"Well *I* never make a mistake about my race on a form." Yeah look buddy, I don't know how to tell you you're white now, but they said some things about your Italian/Irish/etc. ass back in the day.
I was having a really interesting discussion about whether the status of Irish and Italian Americans is irrevocably “White” or if even now they remain liminal last night
I think in their heart of hearts, "white" basically means "Scandinavian" and everybody else is liable to be sus as hell
Whiteness is a club. The anglos let people in when it's politically expedient and presumably will try to kick people out when it's expedient too
My opinion was that by some point in the 1990s or maybe 2001, Irish and Italian Americans were brought fully in the fold as a brighter line was drawn around Whiteness, but the person arguing against me was a academic focused on the issue, so I deferred to them in the end.
My feeling is that "Irish" has sort of the same connotation as "poor white trash" did to the Confederates-- like yeah, you're in the club, but only so we can prove we're not UTTERLY bigoted because we hate some of our own, as well
As an Irish-American, I get a bizarre amount of ethnic bigotry and weirdness. A big part of being White in the US is about willingness to give up other cultural markers. Irish and Italian Americans still really haven’t.
Nobody cares, if you look “white” you’re white
Well Jews have, and will always, be a special case, but that was mostly my argument. However, as I said the person telling me otherwise was definitely better versed in the history, so I had to reconsider my view.
That wasn't the case in the 70s... Italians didn't make the cut then, and neither did Slavs or Eastern Europeans. As a wise man once said, bigotry is fractal.
But that’s the thing Mediterranean and Eastern Europeans have identifiable features that separate them from Northern Europeans, so they didn’t “look white” by the terms of the time.
my grandmother was concerned because my aunt’s greek husband was too swarthy
When I spend enough time in the sun, particularly when I was a kid or working outside, I get a very deep tan, I’ve kinda always loved “swarthy” as a reclaimed insult since it’s no longer widely known
I lived in an Italian town for a decade. The parents all still spoke Italian. The kids used Italian slang words. They were always telling the Puerto Rican folks in town to speak English or get out of 🇺🇸. Asking where’s their green card. Dumb racist 🇺🇸 also not even knowing PR are 🇺🇸
One of my favorite outrageous examples of this liminality is the “Immigration Quotas Act” in the 1920s that deemed all Southern and Eastern European countries as undesirable. This included Italy, of course, it also included Greece /
The collection of immigration acts from 1920~23 came up yesterday in a discussion of the worst federal laws passed since the Civil War, the general consensus was they absolutely ranked among the top 3 and the exact order really didn’t matter at that point.
So odd that the brief period where the KKK had its largest resurgence was also the time we crafted some of the most truly stupid, and evil pieces of legislation. Really makes you think.
The Catholic school I went to as a kid was burned down by the Klan during that period. But the other modern peak for the KKK in the 1950~60s was when the US passed some of its best anti-racism legislation.
My forte with American laws is more in the early 20th century. But yeah, the group of legislators who stood with the civil rights movement at a time when it would have been extremely easy for them not to are genuinely inspiring.
Even considering their myriad of sins when it comes to foreign affairs, I will always admire Eisenhower and LBJ for the difficult, expensive and ultimately correct actions they took against racism.
Suffice it to say all this racist BS does is give us a totally inaccurate view of who is coming here, why, and what actual ingredients are in this supposedly great “melting pot” that isn’t actually all that great to begin with.
Had the “resettlement agreement” between Greece and Turkey already run its course by then, or were they actively fleeing that? I’ve never seen anything about how Jewish people in those two countries were treated during the forced population exchange?
There is also a whole subplot of Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews in Rhodes that, fearing the Italians taking over, took offers from the British in 1918 to go serve as proxies in South Africa. Point being, it was mostly for economic reasons, but it’s so deeply complicated.
In Thessaloniki, which was oddly majority Jewish up until 1920, many of them stayed until, sadly, the Holocaust reached it in 1943.
That was in 1923. That settlement didn’t really affect Sephardic Jews. From my own research, a lot of them left as the Ottoman Empire was collapsing for mostly economic reasons right before that.
Would find a way to go to Cuba for a couple weeks through a network of contacts. Get a piece of paper that said their name was “Jose” instead of “Josefo” or something and then show up in Ellis Island a month after leaving Greece and get logged as another “valuable Cuban immigrant.”
Greece actually had hundreds of thousands of Sephardic Jewish residents looking to leave as the country became an increasingly ethnic-religious nation state. These Sephardim, who had been speaking an old version of Spanish (Ladino) in Greece since 1492 /
The *other* thing about the times is that it has the entire establishment class of the Democratic Party fooled into thinking it speaks for them and to them.
The thing about the entire establishment class of the Democratic Party is that the NYT does speak for them and to them... (Because they are basically conservatives)
He also thinks he’s the elite of the elite and regards everyone else, white or nonwhite, to be simpletons easily swayed by his silver tongue.
When you owe your massive power and privilege to a squirt of sperm, you find it tempting to believe the myth that that squirt made your power and privilege a result of inherent superiority to other people.
"inherited his job from his dad, who inherited his job from HIS dad, who inherited his job from HIS brother-in-law, who inherited his job from HIS father-in-law, who inherited his job from HIS father-in-law"