AHC: A Native American US President

Agreed, Trump is a...

ANY attacks by either side based on ancestry, family, or other personal aspects of opponent's lives should come with legal reprecussions regardless of faction IMO. I wonder how American politics would look if this were the case...

Interesting facts: the actual Pocahontas died at ~21, enduring a loathsome captivity before her first voyage to England where her second child was concieved before she converted to Christianity and going to England - the return voyage resulting in her death. She had two children including a daughter of wholly Native American ancestry and a son of half European and half Powhatan lineage. It was the threat of the Spanish that made her people make peace with the English at Jamestown - not simply geography or the popular ode of John Smith. Apparently at least one of her politically prominent descendants is Edith Wilson while Wayne Newton of Vegas fame reportedly is also a descendant.
 
Statements like this is what has gotten the Cherokees all riled up about Elizabeth Warren using genetic testing to show her heritage. I understand that you didn't mean anything dismissive or malicious by this, but Charles Curtis spent his early childhood on the Kaw reservation, spoke Kaw before he spoke English, and participated in the tribe's culture. Reducing this heritage to a percentile of ancestry can come off as demeaning to Native American culture.

I took to be a reference to the OP's statement that the president had to be "at least half-native". Saying "this person isn't quite half-native, but they're pretty close" is a reasonable response to that.

No it wouldn't. If all of your ancestors came from China, but you were born and raised in Poland as a Pole, then you're Polish.

That is, if I may say, a very American attitude. The US is unusual in having always been based around allegiance towards a common set of principles; in most other nations, national identity is based much more on ethnic origin. So I think that inhabitants of many (most?) other countries would have far less problem saying "If all your ancestors were X, then you're X as well, even if you were brought up in Y-land."
 

dcharleos

Donor
That is, if I may say, a very American attitude. The US is unusual in having always been based around allegiance towards a common set of principles; in most other nations, national identity is based much more on ethnic origin. So I think that inhabitants of many (most?) other countries would have far less problem saying "If all your ancestors were X, then you're X as well, even if you were brought up in Y-land."

It feels more to me like a modern attitude than an American one. There are black/Asian/Italian British, French, etc, etc. I know that attitude is quite common in Asia (and I suspect many developing and ethnically homogeneous areas), but it is far less common in Western Europe, and it isn't at all common in the Americas.

I mean, a guy named Fujimori was the President of Peru. A guy named Fox was the President of Mexico. The Kirchners in Argentina. The concept of nationality as birthright is not unique to the US.
 
If you grew up speaking Polish in Poland, you wouldn't be thrilled if someone suggested your Polish grandmother is why you're Polish.

I don't know about that. My great grandparents grew up speaking Finnish in Finland, and when they came to the US, their descendents have never been ashamed to be part of the group of "Americans with surnames Anglos can't pronounce", along with Poles, Italians, etc. And not much separates people like this from their European relatives but for the language barrier (learning a language like Polish or Finnish is hard for an English speaker).

The tribes themselves do it now.

It's been noted that "being Indian" is the opposite of historic American conceptions on race. A "white person" with a great-great-grandparent who was a black African would technically fail the one drop rule and thus be a black person. But recognised American Indian tribal nations routinely demand tribal members submit proof that they're at least 1/X amount descended from a particular tribe, and there are tribal nations where a 15/16 white person can be an enrolled tribal member.
 
Honestly I don't really get the American obsession with being one-nths of an ethnicity, when they're for all intents and purposes part of a "(White) American ethnicity" far more than they're Irish or whatever European ancestry they have.

Sixty years ago when I was a kid its was still common for many people to refer to one as German, Polish, French, Chinese, whatever based on your immigrant ancestors three generations removed. Others did not give a damm, but there were still a largish minority, usually WASPs who still thought that way. A lot of folks forget Kennedies Catholic faith was thought to disqualify him for Presidency by a few to many people circa 1960.
 
Sixty years ago when I was a kid its was still common for many people to refer to one as German, Polish, French, Chinese, whatever based on your immigrant ancestors three generations removed. Others did not give a damm, but there were still a largish minority, usually WASPs who still thought that way. A lot of folks forget Kennedies Catholic faith was thought to disqualify him for Presidency by a few to many people circa 1960.
In France it's an interesting reverse. Saying that nobody is anything but fully French based on their ancestors is considered deeply racist and very insulting. You can check when France won the World Cup and, due to the proportion of black players, many American made the joke that Africa won the World Cup. It was not well received by the players themselves or the rest of France
 
Sixty years ago when I was a kid its was still common for many people to refer to one as German, Polish, French, Chinese, whatever based on your immigrant ancestors three generations removed. Others did not give a damm, but there were still a largish minority, usually WASPs who still thought that way. A lot of folks forget Kennedies Catholic faith was thought to disqualify him for Presidency by a few to many people circa 1960.

Where I grew up (and I'm in my 30s) this is still the way it was. We were from an area that was heavily Polish, German or Norwegian (with a smattering of New Englanders thrown in as well), and the fact that I was Irish made me stick out more than a little. I can't say that everyone was intensely aware of their ethnic background, but a lot of people were and are. Luckily, save for a few jackasses that don't like Poles, most of this manifests at just the friendly lobbing of ethnic jokes at one another.
 
What is funny about this is everyone on my mothers side is decended from Irish immigrants. Any identification as a 'German' comes strictly from my fathers name. Otherwise I'd pass as Irish with my mothers family name (which may be a English/Gallic adaptation of a 14th Century Flemish name.)
 
In France it's an interesting reverse. Saying that nobody is anything but fully French based on their ancestors is considered deeply racist and very insulting. You can check when France won the World Cup and, due to the proportion of black players, many American made the joke that Africa won the World Cup. It was not well received by the players themselves or the rest of France

An American sideline reporter once referred to Linford Christie as an African-American. Christie corrected him and said "I'm neither African nor American".
 
It feels more to me like a modern attitude than an American one. There are black/Asian/Italian British, French, etc, etc. I know that attitude is quite common in Asia (and I suspect many developing and ethnically homogeneous areas), but it is far less common in Western Europe, and it isn't at all common in the Americas.

I mean, a guy named Fujimori was the President of Peru. A guy named Fox was the President of Mexico. The Kirchners in Argentina. The concept of nationality as birthright is not unique to the US.

There's a difference between citizenship and nationality. Citizenship in most countries is indeed available to those who were born and raised up in that country, but often they aren't considered full members of the country in the same sense as people whose ancestors all come from there. (And this isn't necessarily just a case of minorities wanting to integrate but being prevented by the majority -- e.g., I knew someone once who described herself as Nigerian, despite having been born and raised in London.) Of course, these sorts of attitudes usually fall on a spectrum between two extremes, but I think it's fair to say that the US (and maybe other Latin American countries too -- I note all your specific examples come from that hemisphere) falls further towards the "Anybody born here is as American as anybody else" end than most other countries.
 
What is funny about this is everyone on my mothers side is decended from Irish immigrants. Any identification as a 'German' comes strictly from my fathers name. Otherwise I'd pass as Irish with my mothers family name (which may be a English/Gallic adaptation of a 14th Century Flemish name.)

I'm technically Irish enough to qualify for a Passport, a bit Scottish, maybe, quite possibly Gypsy (Or as family history puts it "A bunch of Intinerant Horse Thieves") and the family name is French, more probably Gascon*. How French I am is un-certain since it first turns up in the Parish records by the 13th century.
Although its also a Department in Brittany, a Place in Wales, an Old Norse term for dried animal waste used as fuel, and the name a Native American Tribe. So who knows!?

(* At least that is where it is also commonly found in use as a surname. The Mediterranean ancestry probably accounts for the occasional dark hue, as opposed to most of the family who are so pale that they barely show up on the visible light spectrum).
 
Jim Thorpe parlayed his celebrity status into a congressional seat then Senate then vp under FDR when he dies
 
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dcharleos

Donor
There's a difference between citizenship and nationality. Citizenship in most countries is indeed available to those who were born and raised up in that country, but often they aren't considered full members of the country in the same sense as people whose ancestors all come from there. (And this isn't necessarily just a case of minorities wanting to integrate but being prevented by the majority -- e.g., I knew someone once who described herself as Nigerian, despite having been born and raised in London.) Of course, these sorts of attitudes usually fall on a spectrum between two extremes, but I think it's fair to say that the US (and maybe other Latin American countries too -- I note all your specific examples come from that hemisphere) falls further towards the "Anybody born here is as American as anybody else" end than most other countries.

But at the same time, remember the uproar a few months ago when Trevor Noah jokingly suggested that the black Frenchmen who played for the World Cup were effectively playing for Africa. The notion of nationality as a birthright rather than an ancestral claim is becoming more and more common around the world.
 
But at the same time, remember the uproar a few months ago when Trevor Noah jokingly suggested that the black Frenchmen who played for the World Cup were effectively playing for Africa. The notion of nationality as a birthright rather than an ancestral claim is becoming more and more common around the world.

I'm not so sure, personally: as I mentioned above, there's a large number of people who were born and raised up in one country but consider themselves to be the same nationality as their ancestors, and the rise of right-wing populism is likely to cause a greater emphasis on nationality as a matter of culture and descent rather than being born in a particular country. Even setting this aside, however, I still think it's fair to say that the US (and maybe other American countries, although I don't know as much about them) is further towards the "nationality is where you were born" end of the scale than most other countries; e.g., anybody born in the US is eligible for citizenship, even if neither of their parents are citizens; conversely, I can't really imagine the US copying countries such as Ireland or Italy and making the descendants of emigrants eligible for citizenship.

ETA: And regarding black football players, I've seen other people refer to them as "Africans" without suffering blowback, because they did so in order to argue for the benefits of immigration and diversity. So while I don't know much about the Trevor Noah controversy, I suspect that it was the way he framed his comment that caused the uproar, rather than describing the players as African per se.
 
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