North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a Republican running to be governor of the red-tinted battleground state, often claims mixed-race Native American descent. But that has not stopped the candidate, known for making incendiary remarks that have embarrassed some fellow party members, from casting doubt on the European role in destroying Native American society, condemning sports teams' efforts to get rid of racially insensitive names and passionately defending Christopher Columbus.
In a series of social media posts from 2015 onwards, Robinson complained about posts he saw from other people that described a settler-colonial genocide in which huge numbers of indigenous peoples were displaced, forcefully assimilated and killed from the Hudson Bay to the Strait of Magellan, calling them "ludicrous" and "VERY historically inaccurate."
"It would seem that a Nation that is as blessed as we are would be too busy giving THANKS on Thanksgiving to have time to make silly memes and ludicrous posts about how we 'killed the Indians,'" he groused, calling anyone who would post such information an "IDIOT" and "INGRATE."
While it is impossible to determine exactly how many people were killed over the centuries and by what means, including armed violence, exposure from displacement, induced starvation and disease, the present-day result of colonization is a reduction of Native American land in the present-day United States to around one to two percent of the country's landmass and the annihilation of the Native American population to the point where, according to some estimates, their numbers still have not recovered past pre-Columbian levels.
In one post, Robinson attempted to turn someone's claim that "the white man will fail" because "injustice will bring destruction" on its head, asking if what the poster suggested was true, "what 'injustice' did the 'Indians' commit to cause their 'destruction' by their land being 'stolen' and being 'murdered by the millions?'" When confronting criticism of Columbus for his role in violently uprooting indigenous societies, Robinson mocked naysayers as "People Who Can’t Cross Town Without A Cellphone, AC, And GPS” who could not compare in greatness to a man "Who Crossed The Ocean In A Wooden Boat With No Running Water And No Electricity."
Robinson blamed the education system for popularizing information about indigenous suffering, accusing colleges in particular of misleading students with "exaggerated claims" that "don't teach our true history" in a 2018 podcast interview. The lieutenant governor, outspoken in his desire to put a conservative stamp on North Carolina's schools, set up a task force in 2021 to investigate "indoctrination" in schools in what many legal experts said at the time was a violation of state law.
His advice to people who post about the genocide of Native Americans: "go read a book."
"Nothing cracks me up more than when someone who writes at a third grade level tries to 'educate' people about a history they don't know themselves," he wrote in a 2016 post.
Robinson did not specify which books he would recommend. One of the first accounts of the colonization of the Americas came from the Spanish priest Bartolomé de Las Casas, who wrote in "A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies" about how soldiers killed indigenous peoples en masse across modern-day Mexico and Central America, forcing survivors to labor in the mines or till the land under appalling conditions. More recent scholarship has produced works like "An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873" by UC Berkeley professor Benjamin Madley, which covers a methodical slaughter by state and federal officials that reduced the state's Native population from 150,000 to 30,000 in the space of two-and-a-half decades.
There's also Robinson's book, a memoir titled "We Are the Majority, The Life and Passions of a Patriot," in which the author writes that his paternal grandmother may have been a "Blackfoot Indian, so the story goes," though he also notes that "none of this is substantiated" and that he "knows very little." The claims of indigenous ancestry appear to be less unequivocal on social media posts from 2015 in which he calls himself an "African-Irish-Continental Native-American" and sees a "REAL African, Indian, Irishman" when he looks in the mirror.
If Robinson sometimes seems unsure about the veracity of his ancestral claims, he is apparently very sure that sports teams changing their names and logos to something less offensive to Native Americans is a grave threat to freedom. When the Washington Redskins rebranded as the Washington Commanders in 2014, Robinson made the old logo his Facebook profile picture and declared that “No Longer Will We Allow Our Freedom, That Was Paid For With The Blood Of Those Who Loved This Country, To Be Taken Away From Us By Those Who Love Neither Freedom Nor The God From Which It Comes.”
He also found a way to bring "murder" into the debate, though he was talking about abortion, not genocide. "How Can A Bunch Of People Who Don’t Bat An Eye Over The Murder Of Infants Get So Upset About The Name Of A Sports Team?” he wrote in 2021, referring to the Cleveland Indians changing their name to the Cleveland Guardians.
The Robinson campaign was not available for comment.
