The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Friday, February 1, 2019

Andrea Mitchell and the Cherokee leadership: being an Indian has nothing to do with DNA

A reductio ad absurdum of an utterly biology free understanding of race.

A view that makes mincemeat out of "people of color" and "nonwhite" and "brown" and "black" as descriptions of the relevant tribes and makes nonsense out of census categories of race and ethnicity.

'We are encouraged by her action': Sen. Elizabeth Warren apologizes to Cherokee Nation, tribal officials confirm

No wonder they don't want to be called "redskins". 

They aren't!

As to Warren, she was trying to substantiate her family's tradition that she had at least one remote Indian ancestor, and she and Trump and all of us assumed that could be checked by a DNA test.

And it could, assuming the ancestry was remote enough for the population of then Indians to actually be Indians rather than mostly or anyway largely white individuals born into tribes that have had massive infusions of white DNA, over the centuries, and forced to subscribe to a biology free notion of racial identity.

All this at a time when Americans in ever larger numbers are checking out their ethnicity with services like Ancestry, 23andMe, and MyHeritage, all which claim to be able to get a pretty fine grained fix by looking at genetic markers.

Though a user might be forgiven for wondering whether some or all of these websites are using public records to figure us out and only pretending to base their calls exclusively on DNA science.

In my case, the original ethnicity results for me several years ago were rather absurd, and an ethnicity update I just saw today, ascribed to better science and better and more biological data, is pretty much right on the money.

Over the years, they have attached to my "family tree" correct information as to my parents and maternal grandparents associated with public records.

And they could know on that sort of basis more than they are letting on.

By the way, what are we to make of immigrants from Guatemala or elsewhere in Latin America who are Indians without a word of any European language.

They are for sure Indians and surely not Hispanics, so far as I can see.

Or is that contrary to whatever is the PC view?

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