Political discussion involving past and present political events, candidates and elections. Please read Msg #1 before posting.
Trump and Pocahantas
Posted by MikeC/TX of TX on 11/29/17 6:31pm
Msg #71211
Trump's racist nickname for Sen. Elizabeth Warren raises an interesting question - why was it wrong for her to misrepresent a part of her heritage when Trump misrepresented his own?
In "The Art of the Deal", Trump repeats the lie that his grandfather immigrated from Sweden. Freidrich Trump immigrated from Germany; his son (and Donald's father) Fred Trump started the lie about where the family came from because he thought his German ancestry would make it more difficult for him to sell apartments after WWII.
Donald Trump kept the heritage lie going for several decades until biographers finally traced his family roots. So that outright lie is acceptable, but Warren's claim that family lore said she had some native roots is not? And before anyone argues that she used it to get a job (and there is no evidence of that), keep in mind that Fred and Donald Trump used their lie to sell real estate.
As far as whether his use of Pocahontas is racist -yeah, it is. Pocahontas was a real person, although the story of her saving the life of John Smith is probably not true. She married a farmer named John Rolfe, converted to Christianity, and was renamed Rebecca. It was then that she revealed that her actual name was Matoaka - Pocahontas was the name given to the English to protect her real name, thinking that knowing her real name would give them power over her.
So by invoking her in demeaning Sen. Warren, Trump has taken a real-life historical figure and turned her into a caricature of an entire race. That's racist. And it's not the first time Trump has treated American Indians this way - here's a video of a hearing on casino gambling in 1993. Trump was upset that some American Indian tribes were allowed to operate casinos on their reservations -essentially, sovereign land - and in doing so disparaged the tribes by claiming "they don't look like Indians to me":
