Not racist because you chuckle? Another
opinion:
Trump’s repeated reference to “Pocahontas” is racist first of all because it’s intended as a pejorative. Trump does not like Warren. It’s also racist because it seizes on a stereotypical Native American name to refer to an entire race — like calling an Asian man “Jackie Chan” or a black man “Frederick Douglass” (one of the president’s favorites). Worse yet, Trump is mushing together his tribes: At an event to honor Navajo heroes, he used the name of a Powhatan woman to disparage a senator who claimed Cherokee ancestry.
And that cuts to the argument that has taken over conservative Twitter in the past two days. Never mind what Trump did, defenders say. What Warren did was worse.
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A better question than whether Warren is actually Native American is whether it matters in this debate — and it doesn’t. Warren could be all Cherokee, or 1/32nd Cherokee, or not Cherokee at all, and Trump would still be using the name of one Native American woman as a slur against all Native American people. The worst of Trump’s latest dust-up with Elizabeth Warren, in other words, has nothing to do with Elizabeth Warren at all.