Last week, CNN topped cable ratings for Election Week, averaging 5.9 million viewers in a rare win over Fox News. After a week of popularity, CNN stayed in the news, this time for breaking down election data that clustered Native and Indigenous American votes as “Something Else” in its demographic breakdown.
This comes at a time when a record-breaking number of Native Americans were elected to Congress in the same week and analysis of voting records showed that Native Americans had some of the greatest turnout rates. In seven key swing states (Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota and Nevada), Native American made a difference because of high turnout. The Native American Journalists Association wrote a public statement in reference to CNN’s categorization saying that, “to refer to Indigenous voters as ‘something else’ fails to recognize the sovereignty and political classification of Native voters” and also demanded a public apology, as well as meeting with senior NAJA staff to improve their coverage of Indigenous people.
If you want to know what one of the end points of genocide looks like, listing Native American people as “something else” on a list of races is a pretty good example! pic.twitter.com/5k7pSyE4Xg
— Joey Clift (@joeytainment) November 4, 2020
Native Voters are not “something else”.
They turned out in record numbers in AZ and made their voices heard. pic.twitter.com/IpK1nCu6mM
— MT (@M22Thompson) November 6, 2020
This controversy is certainly part of a larger conversation around how the media coverage of voters of color is inadequate. “White,” “Latino” and “Black” are considered separate racial categories, for example, when ethnographers have repeatedly pointed out that ‘Latino’ is an ethnicity and not a race.
In Florida, where many political scientists had predicted Latinos would vote for Democrats, large percentages came out for Trump. Latino researchers reminded everyone that Cuban Americans voting for Trump should have been expected and that they’d been calling out the myth of the uniform, monolithic “Latino vote” for decades.
The “Cuban Vote” is not the “Latino Vote.” Cubans have been sold a narrative that they have a guaranteed path to whiteness, and many will sell out every other minority to get it. Trump’s appeal is the appeal of white supremacy.
— Andrea L. Pino-Silva (@andreactually) November 4, 2020
