{"id":25656,"date":"2012-09-28T21:33:14","date_gmt":"2012-09-28T21:33:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=25656"},"modified":"2012-09-30T16:51:18","modified_gmt":"2012-09-30T16:51:18","slug":"race-and-a-political-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=25656","title":{"rendered":"Race and a Political Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

Race and a Political Race<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Everyday Sociology Blog<\/a>
\n2012-09-28<\/p>\n

Jonathan R. Wynn<\/a><\/strong>, Assistant Professor of Sociology
\nUniversity of Massachusetts, Amherst<\/em><\/p>\n

Dwanna L. Robertson<\/a><\/strong>
\nUniversity of Massachusetts, Amherst<\/em><\/p>\n

The Massachusetts<\/a> Senate race between incumbent Scott Brown<\/a> and Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren<\/a> took an unexpected sharp turn this week. Shades of racialized language (reminiscent of the 2008 Presidential campaign) seeped in. This actually started in April, when Brown\u2019s staffers uncovered that Warren claimed she was a minority, implicating her as committing ethnic fraud because she lacked proof of a Native American ancestry.
\n\u00a0
\nDuring their first political debate, Brown went straight at this issue in a prepared remark, saying, \u201cProfessor Warren claimed she was a Native American, a person of color\u2014And as you can see, she\u2019s not.\u201d With this statement, Brown contends he can identify Native Americans\u2014and other people of color\u2014just by looking at them.<\/p>\n

It would be humorous\u2014Did she accidentally forget to braid her hair and wear her moccasins?<\/em>\u2014if it didn\u2019t have serious undertones cutting at the heart of race and politics in the U.S.. Brown suggests Warren received special consideration for claiming she was part Cherokee. \u201cWhen you are a U.S. Senator,\u201d he stated, \u201cyou have to pass a test and that’s one of character and honesty and truthfulness. I believe and others believe she’s failed that test.” But did<\/em> Warren fail the test?…<\/p>\n

..Back to Brown\u2019s assertion idea that our eyes can tell us a person\u2019s race. Sociologist Mary Campbell<\/a> has been working on misclassification of race based upon skin tone, finding not only that American Indians experience a high level of misidentification, but that in the process they also experience higher levels of psychological distress…<\/p>\n

There is, however, a real challenge when it comes to speaking of how indigenous folk look. It is not just that it’s a bad idea to think facial features are satisfactory markers of race. It is that the emphasis on perception also indicates a complete misunderstanding of U.S. History: People who claim First Nation Heritage are of a mixed ethnic background due to generations of attempted racial extermination, cultural oppression, and a breaking of tribal links to land and community…<\/strong><\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Race and a Political Race Everyday Sociology Blog 2012-09-28 Jonathan R. Wynn, Assistant Professor of Sociology University of Massachusetts, Amherst Dwanna L. Robertson University of Massachusetts, Amherst The Massachusetts Senate race between incumbent Scott Brown and Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren took an unexpected sharp turn this week. Shades of racialized language (reminiscent of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,3015,6,26,394,20],"tags":[11615,11616,10647,12183,12184,12185,2830,3712,10933],"class_list":["post-25656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-native-americans","category-new-media","category-politics","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-dwanna-l-robertson","tag-dwanna-robertson","tag-elizabeth-warren","tag-everyday-sociology-blog","tag-jonathan-r-wynn","tag-jonathan-wynn","tag-mary-campbell","tag-massachusetts","tag-scott-brown"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25656\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}