It's muh heritage

Lol some cracker reported this meme as "any race joke is racist"
- It's not racist if it's self deprecating.
- You're the sole community mod. If I were you I'd do pole in the comments and remove it if enough people thought it was racist. Not saying you have to, but it would be wise to do so.
  Edit: I'm brown and don't find it offensive. The point which I believe was pretty damn clear is that the person who made the post is the sole mod and there's an issue with power there (even if its a meaningless meme community on a tiny social platform).
  
  Ah yes, why don't we just "pole the comments" about the meaning of any word we don't understand the definition of, and we can let the comment section right here be the sole arbiters of what a word means rather than let experts in the relevant field define what a word means. That's how language and research and science should work, via Lemmy comment section democracy.
  
  Lmao this doesn't need a damn poll wtf
  
  It also really is a thing though. I grew up on the East Coast and there's an obsession with some social circles and insisting they have a token Native American ancestor. And it's always Cherokee. It's absolutely ridiculous and should be mocked.
  
  Not just the sole community mod, the instance admin no less. Personally, I laughed, but anyone who finds this offensive should probably set their expectations (and perhaps block list) accordingly.
  
  Oh fuck off, cracker. You can't be racist toward white people.

Pretendians, more than meets the eye!

My go to when I hear this is to ask "Do you think it was consensual? Cause ya know what we did to those people, right?"
- My grandfather and grandmother cared about each other enough he married her. Resulting in his family disowning him because she was white.

Ha
I was at a green corn festival celebration and this 50 year old white lady came up to the dance leader and was like "I'm native, well, 0.6% but still,"
My man's face lol, i couldn't even hear the rest of the sentence over my internal cringing

What it really means when they're "part Cherokee": "one of our ancestors had sex with a Black person and we're all too ashamed to admit it, so we told you you're part Cherokee to make you feel better."
- Oh that's Seminole. Which most racist people are too ignorant to realize meant runway slave (In this context, the majority of Seminole were/are straight up indigenous), and thus actually a black ancestor they didn't want to acknowledge. But they had to put something on the family tree in the family bible. That's a fun one to find in the South East US.
  Cherokee is usually a straight up fiction. Personally I think the idea got popularized because people like feeling special and native Americans were big news in the 1970's. Racists also jumped on it as a means of showing native Americans didn't deserve special rules or treatment.

In Oklahoma, if you can trace your ancestry back to someone who was on the Dawes Rolls, you can apply to be a member of the Cherokee Nation regardless of your percentage of native ancestry. So there are a lot of people who are effectively white, but are part of the Nation and consider themselves part Cherokee.
This is distinct from the "part Cherokee" or "descended form a Cherokee princess" claims that were used to try and legitimize white supremacy in the south.

Honest question, really asking in good faith, why is it ok to make this joke, but anyone who doesn't accept that Kamala Harris isn't 'black', despite the color of her skin being light toned, is told off?
- Because of the concept of "passing". Identities are more than just who someone's parents are. They include the life they live and the experiences they have. Someone who looks white, lives white, and is perceived as white can very well have a Cherokee parent, but identifying as Cherokee is more like a technicality than a reality. Especially if they don't live on reserve, speak the language, or practice the customs.
  
  That explains why this joke is ok - which I do appreciate you took the effort to do - but not why you can't call Kamala Harris white.
- Beyond being directed at a specific person (the main reason), there are many out there who believe that privilege on a systemic level somehow means it is impossible to be racist or bigoted to the group "on top".
  I've also seen this stated as "No bad tactics, only bad targets" and "punching down vs punching up".
  See the other comment on this post saying you can't be racist to white people for a direct example of someone with this sort of belief.
  So that would mean that this is acceptable, as it targets whites (historically/generally/systemically "on top"), but similar things targeting any minority group are not.
  At the risk of drawing fire, I disagree wholeheartedly. Racism, sexism, etc exists regardless of the power dynamics involved. The effect of it is what can be changed due to "who's on top", not whether or not it exists or can happen.
  But I've also been a "class war is more important than culture war" type person for ages, so take it as you will.
- I would guess it's because this is not toward a specific person. But rather it's saying that many people who claim to be part Cherokee really aren't, not just that don't appear to be. At least, that's how I take it.
  Supposedly I'm part Cherokee but I've seen no evidence that I'm anything other than European decent. Palest mf you've seen.
  
  My SO is super white with red hair, but is 1/8 native American. Genetics are weird.
- Nobody else has mentioned this so I'll step in. There is a concept known as a "pretendian" who is someone that, despite having no roots in the culture, piggybacks on top of it in order to claim that they also suffered.
  It's not simply appropriation but it's closer to saying your grandfather died in the Holocaust when he was actually an accountant in Oklahoma during WW2 and never actually even went off to war.
  A more modern example would be when George Santos claimed his mother died in 9/11 and it turns out his mother wasn't in New York and died years later.
  Piggybacking on a tragedy or a genocide for sympathy points is bad and the meme is making fun of people who do this. Not specifically all white people.