CNN stays silent on Rick Santorum’s comments about Native American culture
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Ignorance lives in close proximity to racism. “We birthed a nation from nothing,” said former senator Rick Santorum at an April 23 Young America’s Foundation event. “I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans, but candidly there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”
In this instance, the rhetorical atrocity was almost too easy to dismantle. “To correct the record, what European colonizers found in the Americas were thousands of complex, sophisticated, and sovereign Tribal Nations, each with millennia of distinct cultural, spiritual and technological development,” wrote Fawn Sharp, president of the National Council of American Indians. “Over millennia, they bred, cultivated and showed the world how to utilize such plants as cotton, rubber, chocolate, corn, potatoes, tomatoes and tobacco. Imagine the history of the United States without the economic contributions of cotton and tobacco alone. It’s inconceivable.” Other such denunciations have cropped up since news of the comments surfaced on Monday.
Rick Santorum isn’t just a former senator, though; he’s a CNN contributor, meaning that he gets paid to appear on the network and comment on the news. The Erik Wemple Blog, accordingly, asked CNN whether it had any comment on the situation.
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