What Does it Mean that Elizabeth Warren has a Native American Ancestor?
Photo by Matt From London
Elizabeth Warren got DNA tested. It turns out that on her 10th chromosome she has a good chunk of DNA that is likely Native American in origin.
It’s worth nothing that this is not a mound of DNA. The Boston Globe corrected its story and corrected it again to state that Warren has “a potential 10th generation relative” amounting to 1/1024 Native Americanness. Razib Khan, however, who I trust in all these matters clarifies that this is not your average white person:
Some are asking whether Warren is just a typical white American. You would need to do apples-to-apples comparisons. But my intuition is that she’s not. Most Old Stock white Americans probably have a genealogical relationship to Native Americans, but they may not have any segments of DNA because it is too far back. Warren is part of the minority of white Americans who have detectable Native American ancestry.
You can predict the reactions. Some are latching onto the laughable remoteness of 1/1024. On the other hand, she never claimed to be 100% or even 50%. Instead, she said that she grew up believing there was a Native American ancestor in her family, and that appears to have been true.
But is she Native American? There’s some arguments to be made for and against.
- Race is socially constructed, and in every way that matters, she lives the life of a white woman.
This seems true. She presents as white. People’s assumption upon meeting her will be that she is white. She doesn’t seem to have suffered racial discrimination in her hiring. If she’s suffered in elections, it’s for being white, not for being Native American. She can pass for white whenever she wants to.
Here’s a subtle example. Ana Navarro tweeted this:Elizabeth Warren should poke fun at all this and actually dress like Pocahontas for Halloween>>> Elizabeth Warren releases results of DNA test on Native American ancesty – The Boston Globe https://t.co/2dt4P5jqW6
— Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (@ananavarro) October 15, 2018
A lot of white people on Twitter were horrified by this prospect and insisted that Warren should not actually do this. I agree. Somehow, we know that doing that would be wrong. It would seem that if Warren truly laid full claim to this heritage, it should be her choice and not ours. I know I would not insist that a black friend who presents as black not dress up as a black historical figure. Why shouldn’t Warren be just as free to do what she wants? - She believes she is Native American.
There’s good reason to weight people’s beliefs about themselves over others’. If someone tells you they are a man when they look like a woman, the only reasonable response is to believe they are a man unless you want to demand they show you proof. Warren is the expert on her. If Native American is part of her self-identity, that is what matters. - Native Americans regularly reject claims of white people to be Native American.
A not insignificant number of real-life Native Americans say this isn’t a question of genetics. Instead, their identity is based on several other things that Warren does not share with them. Here is a sampling:Indigenous Nationhood does not come from a test tube.
It comes from active community involvement.
From an unyielding connection to land.
From your ancestors having sheltered your nation's resistance leader.
From Ceremony, from water, from ancient songs.
It's a responsibility.— SaltyLilOjibwe (@SaltyLilOjibwe) October 15, 2018
Dear @SenWarren: A DNA test does not make you Native! 🙄 Even if you had a CDIB that would not make you Native! Native identity is more than blood and blood myths. Being Native is about culture, language, history and more! But you don’t have that, stop claiming Native, PERIOD!
— Emilio Reyes 🌐 (@emiliotongva) October 15, 2018
Seriously, can we talk about how Warren did the biggest disservice to Natives by doing this? It’s just upholding the idea that DNA has anything to do with being Native. Kinship ties mmkay! #ElizabethWarren https://t.co/PARZDa6iEq
— Emmy Scott (@EmmyNawjoopinga) October 15, 2018
Warren allowed herself to be publicly touted by Harvard as being a Native American and did not step into correct it. Being a professor of law, she should have known “Indian” is a legal status. It’s deeply unethical for her to allow Harvard to do this. pic.twitter.com/S1jHz1LhoQ
— Emmy Scott (@EmmyNawjoopinga) October 15, 2018
. - There’s a DNA test that says she has a Native American ancestor.
When it comes down to it, she said she had a Native American ancestor, and it turns out she most likely did. Maybe that’s not enough to call her Native American, but it definitely is enough to call her a white woman with a Native American ancestor. - DNA tests don’t matter to Native Americans.
if folks privilege DNA company declarations of who is indigenous they're saying (mostly white) geneticists have the right to define us.
— Kim TallBear (@KimTallBear) July 11, 2016
….ask yourself why it matters so much. lots of white folks who newly ID as "multi-racial" on the US census are checking the Native Am box
— Kim TallBear (@KimTallBear) July 11, 2016
are folks trying to escape whiteness? trying to claim in addition to all of the land & resources a right to our IDs via claims to our DNA?
— Kim TallBear (@KimTallBear) July 11, 2016
The @SenWarren camp does not get to go from a DNA test won’t prove anything to a DNA test proves everything overnight.
This is a clear move to silence Native voices who have legitimate concerns about the damage her false claims do to public understanding of our identity.
— Rebecca Nagle (@rebeccanagle) October 15, 2018
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I’m genuinely torn here. I feel respect should be given to those who have truly suffered for their identities, which Warren has not. If they object, I would like to defer to their views. Unfortunately, it may be difficult to get a true census rather than a handful of tweets I was able to find.
On the other hand, her claim was likely made in good faith. The same good, misplaced faith behind “Johnny Cash, Johnny Depp, Miley Cyrus, and Bill Clinton’s” claimed Cherokee ancestry.
For white people to claim distant Cherokee heritage in 1855 or so had the interesting effect of “legitimating the antiquity of their native-born status as sons or daughters of the South,” as Gregory Smithers writes in Slate. In a crucial moment of swelling Southern pride, pointing out that your family had been here long enough to intermarry with Cherokees was a method of staking a claim to Southern identity. Southern white identity.
Their descendants believed them, and then they had children of their own who also believed these stories, and so on. Johnny Cash probably wasn’t faking it on purpose?—?he just believed his grandparents.
I haven’t done a tally, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are literal millions of white people who claim to have some Native American ancestry but in fact have less than Warren does. Warren’s failing, if she is to be credited one at all, is no more than theirs.
When I was growing up, I overheard a conversation between my parents and some friends of theirs about a guy they knew from synagogue and whose son I know from school. He had decided he was illegitimate, worked out who his real father was must, and announced that he was Irish. They were all skeptical.
I never heard anything more, so I don’t know if this was ever resolved, but it’s an interesting jumping-off point: suppose you learned relatively late in life that your ethnicity was not what you thought: should that matter? Would you take up drinking Irish whiskey, or reading Yeats, or giving money to Noraid? Or would you decide that the way you were brought up and the community you’re part of now is who you are? Or decide to be Swedish because you’ve always liked the little meatballs and the true meaning of American is that everyone can reinvent themselves as they please?Report
It would probably depend on the ethnicity or race and the degrees of separation. I wouldn’t do things like the reductio’s in your second paragraph, but I’d probably look at myself differently and I’d look at others of that race/ethnicity differently.
That’s not a reasonable response to such revelations. But it’s how I’d respond, I’m sure.
I’ll go further and suggest that “the social construction of race/ethnicity” usually includes a “social construction of the importance of ancestry.” And because I live among the society that does the constructing (and because I have only one vote among millions about how that social construction is constructed), it’s not entirely out of the question that someone would act/think differently upon learning of an unexpected part of one’s ancestry.Report
These days I wouldn’t be suprised to run across someone who said their mother was a refugee from Alderaan, a planet which was destroyed by the Galactic Empire, if they thought it would move them up on the heirarchy of victimhood.
Back when Warren was making these claims, having Native American ancestry seemed to be a big deal in academia. I don’t know how many here recall Ward Churchill, a Colorado professor who wrote that the US Army gave small pox infested blankets to Indians, and who claimed to be Native American, listing his ancestry as Moscogee, Creek, Cherokee, and other tribes, and claiming to be 3/16ths Cherokee. He much later turned out to be a crank and a fraud who didn’t have a single Indian among 142 ancestors, but he built an entire career on claiming to be an Indian spokesman.
I suppose we perhaps all know who killed the idea of trying to gain liberal social status from being Native American. Say it with me. “Sarah Palin”. She was married to a Native American/Alaska Native, and I guess ruined for everybody else on the Democrat side.Report
If I wanted to reconnect personally with my birth family, culture might well matter a lot.
Otherwise, I’d be more interested in things like hereditary diseases.Report
My mother’s father sometimes claimed that he was one-sixteenth Cherokee Indian. Which, as Iearned my history, didn’t make a ton of sense to me because his entire family had seemingly lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for ever. But perhaps some had come from Georgia, Alabama, or Tennessee at some point? In any event, he made the claim.
My maternal aunt did a genetics test and it came back all European. Not a bit of New World ancestry at all. Our ancestors came from a much wider swath of Europe than we’d been led to believe, but all of it European. If my grandfather had been relating stories accurately, my aunt should have been one thirty-second Cherokee (or, more likely Menomenee or Winnegabo or Potawotami, with her father’s ancestry so deeply rooted in the upper midwest). By then, my grandfather had long since passed so we have no way to challenge him with the science.
While my grandfather had some unappealing qualities vis-à-vis his attitude towards black people, as did many of his generation, he was an honest man. Put a great premium on honesty, even when he had to make concessions he disliked. So I presume he was sincere in his claim to Native ancestry.
My working theory is that at one point in time, having a Native grandfather made you more of a badass. So perhaps his father felt a need to brag about being a badass, and this was one way he did it. My grandfather would have been a very young boy at this point, so he simply believed everything that his father had said.
This seems like the sort of thing that would be a common story. It happens that in Warren’s case, it was accurate.Report
My high school friend, surname Goodbrod, was a quarter Winnebago. The time I met his grandfather, he warned me before hand, “For gods’ sake don’t say ‘Winnebago Sioux’, because according to grandpa, the only proper way to modify Sioux is ‘f*cking Sioux’.” Enormous amounts of ill will amongst the Great Plains tribes and tribes from farther east. Much of the confiscation of the Great Plains was possible because the US government accepted grants from tribes that were giving away their enemies’ territory, and no one was performing due diligence.Report
Burt,
You only have 50% of your parents DNA and ethnic markers are assigned randomly. In theory, any ethnicity in your parent that is less than 50% of their total could miss you completely. You can still claim those roots from a genealogical perspective, but DNA is different. That’s why I look like I just fell off the cabbage truck, with fair skin and reddish hair, but my sister looks like an Italian. My brother is closer to her in skin tone and hair color, but he and I look very much alike in our facial features. Genetics are endlessly fascinating.Report
To clarify a bit more… a lot of people assume if you are 50% Irish your kid will be 25% on a test. It doesn’t work out that way.Report
Understood abut the science (the “diluting paint v. shuffling cards” simile below is a very good one, though I could have done without the other terms even if used ironically); I agree that the evidence at hand is not dispositive. Suffice to say that there is both a lack of documentary evidence substantiating the claim (and yes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence) and some other social indicators within the family that make me skeptical of the veracity of the claim.
Perhaps my awkward ball-handling on that point obscured some other issues I wished to raise:
1. It may not have been such a social disadvantage, even seventy to a hundred years ago, to claim a degree of Native ancestry; and
2. Claims of this nature are common and may well originate from times when folks acting in good faith might plausibly have not known so much about their own ancestry as we do now; so
3. Shame on everyone involved for making such a big deal out of it in Senator Warren’s case; she never claimed membership in a tribe and is very far from the first person in politics to enjoy a bit of dubiously-earned cultural cachet. The President claims the cultural cachet of Horatio Alger with his “pulled myself up by my own bootstraps” story which as it turns out is totally bullshit. Senator Warren’s occasional social identification as having Cherokee ancestry appears roughly equivalent, if not lesser than, Trump’s prevarication about himself.Report
What do we think about Trump and his ethics?Report
Lying about how much of his money he actually made? I care more than a small amount because his business acumen is part of his statement of qualification for the Presidency.
But I don’t care as much as a large amount because, especially at this point, it’s a) part of a morass of many other more profound ethics issues, and b) his skill at Presidenting, or lack thereof, is now on display.
Elizabeth Warren is not offering Native ancestry as a qualification for the Presidency. It goes to her general propensity for veracity, I suppose. I put it somewhere around the level of “…But I never inhaled.”Report
Your aunt’s wholly European genome does not necessarily contradict her father’s claim to be one-sixteenth Native. It’s not like diluting paint – it’s more like shuffling cards. As far as I know, my brother and I are entirely European in ancestry. My sister-in-law is a mulatto (and a nuyorican), and her two beautiful daughters are therefore quadroons, to use accurately an old-fashioned and no doubt potentially offensive term. One of my nieces has “skin the color mocha”, just like her mother, and the other is a blonde white woman. The latter has a picture on her facebook page of herself, her mother, and her maternal grandmother – with the caption “I am NOT adopted”.Report
This doesn’t mean as much as you think, though. My mom and I both did DNA tests and she was three percent Native American and I was zero. Genes don’t get handed down in the fractional ways that we imagine that they do, because of the way chromosomes get shuffled. They don’t just get divvied up equally and handed down in proper proportions to everyone precisely the same. So in a generation it’s possible to have a real genetic link that’s no longer visible.
It doesn’t mean that genealogically you don’t have that heritage or that anyone was lying, just that it wasn’t among the genes that happened to get handed down to your aunt. Other relatives very well may have some of that DNA or it may not have been handed down to anyone because everyone got other genes instead.Report
I did the Ancestry thing and had <1% Jewish ancestry. My maternal aunt had 2% on her test but this doesn't tell me a lot. In theory I could have gotten 0% from her side of the family and my <1% from somewhere in my dad's line. With as much German heritage as I have on both sides of the family, it's actually surprising we didn't see more Jewish ancestry.Report
They have recently updated the Ancestry results in a really dramatic way so you might want to go back and check again because mine ended up being a lot different than they were at first. I had some very low confidence findings disappear completely and I suddenly became substantially Scandinavian when I wasn’t before.
Uff da.Report
Thank you so much for letting me know about that! I just checked and yes, some significant changes. I previously had 16% Scandinavian which is now 5% Sweden and 2% Norway. I guess the rest was absorbed into Germanic Europe or Northwestern Europe.
I always wondered about the Scandinavian one. I’m pretty knowledgeable about my genealogy and I am not aware of any Scandinavian in the last 200 years. I wondered if that came from Vikings colonizing England and Ireland, but man, that’s over 1000 years ago. Seems unlikely that would still be showing up in a test like this. I’ve tried research how far back the tests go and it’s a bit unclear, so I guess it’s possible.Report
My dad (who is super into geneaology because he was adopted) has a surprising amount of Middle Eastern genes which allegedly are present in a high percentage of Irish people. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/dec/28/origins-of-the-irish-down-to-mass-migration-ancient-dna-confirms My understanding is that some genes set up shop in the population and stick around, so even without another influx of Viking blood people like you and me end up with lots of Scandinavian genes even without recent ancestors just because some of them have continued to be passed down.Report
Fascinating stuff. My boss, who is nearly 100% Irish used to tease me because I’m only about 25%, but when I explained there was also another 16% of Viking blood he said, “Okay, that’s badass,” and let me in the club. Plus, the red hair helps.Report
Given the history of how whites have treated Native Americans, having a distant Native American ancestor in your very white family tree may not be a good thing. It might be a random tale of true love, but it may also very well be a tale of rape and servitude.
Probably best not to play that card unless you are very comfortable with it’s pedigree.Report
The Cherokee Nation released a statement. I’m not sure how much authority they have on this, though.
Comparisons to Rachel Dolezal keep coming to mind.Report
The Rachel Dolezal issue reminds me of the Tuvel/Hypatia kerfuffle. Having read Tuvel’s paper, I agree with Tuvel that the reasons people invoke to deny someone their identity are so similar they stand and fall together regardless of whether said identity is gender or race based.Report
Yeah, the problem with Tuvel was that she was ahead of her time.Report
I am really torn on this. I think claiming this, it the ways shown above via the Harvard bio and the cookbook, is a bit dishonest. On the other hand, I am one-fourth Jewish. Now, I knew my grandfather and the history of that part of the family is very well known, both to me and the world at large.
I don’t consider myself a Jew and am very careful to say and write Jew-ish, as I think that is the handiest way to describe myself on the rare occasions that it comes up. Judaism swirls around my mother’s side of the family among the old and dying out generation to such an extent that to me it is background noise. And I also know that, do to my grandfathers Jewishness, if I had lived in Nazi Germany, I would not have been sent to an extermination camp, but would have simply been chemically castrated and enslaved. For I am 1/4th Jewish in this regard.
All that to say that sometimes these things, the little tales that you have been told or what not, also form part of your identity. For good and ill. I think that to a certain degree, this has informed her identity in a way that makes it important to her, and is what has driven her to be the woman she is today.Report
Elizabeth Warren has released a tweet:
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Just the opposite. The typical white American has MORE (not less) native blood than Warren does.
If memory serves, her “failing” is she used Affirmative Action to her advantage with a false claim.Report
Just the opposite. The typical white American has MORE (not less) native blood than Warren does.
But not a full DNA sequence like she has, which suggests a relatively recent ancestor.
If memory serves, her “failing” is she used Affirmative Action to her advantage with a false claim.
It doesn’t serve. There is no evidence she ever benefitted from AA.Report
IIRC, she didn’t materially benefit from the claim, but Harvard tried to benefit from her claim, which is how it came to the fore.Report
The WSJ walked us through this a while back.
Yes, Harvard benefited from her claim… but that was apparently part of how she was able to be there. Her professional specs were substantially lower than normal for what she did.
Apparently its unusual for Harvard to reach out to the University of Pennsylvania when recruiting Profs. So being an Indian opened doors when it was convenient.Report
The Harvard hiring committee says her ethnicity never came up.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2018/09/01/what-harvard-professors-say-about-elizabeth-warren-hiring/iLiqqJezD67gPmFplGtMSN/story.htmlReport
By the way, do you recall where the WSJ said otherwise? If it was reporting, I’d be curious to see it. If it was editorial, well, they’ve often been known to lie.Report
I suspect it was an editorial, but it was years ago.Report
It’s kind of in their interest to say that.
I mean, it may be true but, if it were false, I can see them saying “let’s say that her ethnicity never came up anyway”.Report
We hear this all the time out of Harvard on any subject related to race. The Harvard approach to Affirmative Action is to pretend they’re not lowering/raising their standards.
So magically all Asians score rotten on the personality test and we’re just supposed to pretend it has nothing to do with their skin color and Harvard isn’t thinning their numbers to make room for others. The reverse is true for Indians and Blacks when they’re wildly successful on subjective tests.
If Harvard is bragging about getting a Indian Law Prof, then the way to bet is yes, they knew, and it came up. If she’s from a backwater that Harvard normally ignores, then the way to bet is yes, it mattered.Report
The fact that you’ve left whites out of this equation tells me a lot about where you are coming from on these issues.Report
Weirdly this sort of thing is mostly a non-issue for whites.
Asians take it on the chin.
Blacks “benefit” a lot (although it’s mostly immigrant or high Soc-Economic Blacks)… and “benefit” includes problems from being mismatched.
Whites don’t suffer/benefit much.Report
Of course whites benefits. You’ve noted that the percentage of Asians is much less than it would be if Harvard and other such institutions went purely on grades and test scores. But for some reason, you’ve decided that only blacks are benefiting. For some reason you’ve decided that “affirmative action” is a benefit, but the space set aside for legacies and the children of wealthy donors is not.
Do the math. Here is the ethnic breakdown of Cal Tech, which has no affirmative action:
Asian – 43%
White – 29%
Hispanic – 12%
Black – ~1%
The rest is unaccounted for, but the story is pretty clear. When you just go by grades and test scores the over-representation of Asians swamps both black and white admissions. It’s the same story at Stuyvesant and the other specialized high schools in NYC that are 2/3 to 3/4 Asian in a city that is 12% Asian.Report
I like doing math. You’re missing an “Unknown” of 15%. Harvard didn’t mention how many are White/Unknown so I’ll copy Cal Tech’s.
Harvard Ethnicity: https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics
African American: 15.2%
Asian American: 22.9%
Hispanic or Latino: 12.3%
Native American: 1.9%
Native Hawaiian: 0.4%
Unknown: 15% (assumed)
White: 32.3% (calculated)
So within the margin of error/chance/choice, there is no difference between White enrollment at Harvard and White enrollment at CalTech.
Even if we assume these numbers are far more predictive than I expect, changing White enrollment from 32% to 29% is a 10% drop, while Blacks+Indians would see something like a 95% drop.
From a “white” perspective, this doesn’t look like a serious issue.Report
The Harvard link that you gave doesn’t give a number for whites. I can’t comment on your numbers for whites, because I don’t know the source.
But, the same site where I got the Cal Tech info gives the number for whites at Harvard at 42% and Asian at 17%: https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/harvard-university/student-life/diversity/
If Harvard is unfairly keeping Asian admission low, it’s doing it for two reasons: to keep minority enrollment up (i.e. affirmative action) and to keep white enrollment up (i.e. legacies and the children of the wealthy/connected). You’re only complaining that one of these is unfair.Report
The source is “calculated” based on Harvard’s info. The total percentage of students is 100%. Harvard didn’t give numbers for “white” or “unknown” so I assumed their unknown matched Cal Tech’s and everything which remained was White. This probably results in over-counting whites at Harvard but that’s just another reason to think it’s not a big issue.
Presumably Harvard’s numbers for itself are better (likely Cal Tech’s for Harvard are dated). We really should be comparing numbers from the same year.
I’m talking about icebergs and you’re telling me I’m ignoring ice cubes. Yes, I am. Black enrollment is twenty times greater at Harvard then it would be if the system were merit based. White enrollment’s increase is somewhere between an extra ten percent and zero. So it rounds to zero in the larger picture, especially when compared to a 20x increase.
You’re engaged in “whataboutism”. This is not to say Harvard isn’t favoring legacies and so forth, or that it hits the radar as fair, but society has a hierarchy of evil, and we have major laws outlawing what Harvard is doing to the Asians for darn good reason.
Further, 29% of Harvard’s student body is legacy. We need a lot more data to fully figure out what’s going on there. If Harvard went full merit, having the White student body to drop a few percentage points (the difference between Harvard and Cal Tech) seem reasonable, but it seems unreasonable to think Whites disappear from Harvard’s campus in total (see also Cal Tech).
So… does Harvard define “legacy” so loosely that an absurd number of people are? Do people like Obama have the ability to give their kids extreme educational advantages and there’s not a lot of difference between “merit” and “legacy” by the time they get to Harvard?Report
If Harvard admitted solely on test scores and GPA, the racial composition would be:
Whites: 35.48% (down 6% from 37.61%)
Blacks: 0.94% (down 94% from 15.81%)
Hispanics: 2.72% (down 86% from 14.90%)
Asians: 51.65% (up 108% from 24.86%)
LinkReport
The suggestion that Penn, one of the best schools in the country, is a “backwater” is as hilariously false as it is revealing of bias on this subject.Report
I get what a full gene (out of the 46) would mean, and I also get that the Press is mostly English majors, but the numbers I’m seeing suggest less than a full gene.
(wiki) …the results of the test mean that Warren is likely between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American.
4-5 generations back is clearly a full gene match and is how we find serial killers from their their distant blood relatives. 6-10 generations back seems less than that, especially when that might mean “generations back from someone who was 1/32 (but part of the tribe) himself”.Report
Would you believe Razib Khan?Report
Yes.
Thank you, very well done. Your link also links to the original release which was informative.
The way to bet is 8 generations back.Report
Sorry, I had meant to link to Razib at the top, but it looks like I forgot to actually include the URL. It’s there nowReport
So, why are we not talking about Kevin McCarthy?
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-na-pol-mccarthy-contracts-20181014-story.html
Report
We should very much be talking about McCarthy, as should some US Attorneys.Report
They should investigate the ever-loving crap out of that guy!
(Also, we seem to have moved from “Elizabeth Warren just owned Trump by proving that someone between six and ten generations of ancestors of hers was Native American!” to “Why are we still talking about this?” in the space of 12 hours.)Report
What you mean, “We” kemosabe?
Maybe I’m not as plugged into The Left as I thought, but I don’t recall Warren’s native ancestry being of any particular interest in our secret cell meetings.Report
Do you want a list of triumphalist articles released this morning?
Okay. (I lifted this from Jesse Kelly, who asked people for articles talking about how Warren was vindicated by her DNA test.)
The Daily Beast had “Elizabeth Warren Fights Trump’s ‘Pocahontas’ Taunt With DNA Test Proving Native American Roots”
Politico had “Elizabeth Warren hits back at Trump, releases DNA test ‘strongly’ supporting Native American ancestry”
CNN’s Chris Cillizza had “What Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test reveals (and it’s not what you think)”
TPM had “After Years Of Trump Mockery, Warren DNA Analysis Shows Native American Heritage” (I *LOVE* that one. Not just ancestry. “Heritage”.)
Slate has “After years of being called “Pocahontas” by Trump, Warren proves she has Native American ancestry”
Bloomberg had this one “Elizabeth Warren Positions Herself as the Front-Runner”
(I didn’t bother with little dinky local news stations.)
All of these have a vague “IN YOUR FACE, ORANGE GOBLIN!” tone to them.
And, since they came out, Warren has acknowledged that she shouldn’t officially call herself Native American and we, apparently, are acknowledging that Warren’s ancestry has never been of any particular interest.
Hell of a day.Report
Who brought this subject up originally?
Who has kept it going ever since?
This is entirely a product of the right wing fever swamps, like the birther stuff.Report
See? In 24 hours, we’ve gone from “HA! SHE PROVED IT! NOW TRUMP HAS TO PAY A MILLION DOLLARS!” to “why are we still talking about this?”
(CNN’s Chris Cillizza had a follow-up article this morning: “Elizabeth Warren might have actually made things worse with her DNA gambit“)Report
Well of course.
For liberals this was never anything more than a silly distraction, something we could snicker about if it needled Trump.
For conservatives, this is some kind of killer argument that proves…well, crap, I’m not sure what they think this is about.
But whatever it is, its the key to destroying her, you can bet on that.Report
The issue IS silly which boggles the mind as to why Warren brought it up again. With that said, this is also the liberal chickens coming home to roost. The obsession with identity on the Left means that we should take this more seriously simply for the hypocrisy it represents. I don’t think the Left should get to obsess over race and ethnicity and affirmative action and then hand-wave this away.Report
Yup, Leftists, obsessed with identity.Report
Wanna know what it was for The Cherokee Nation itself?Report
Who cares?
Seriously, there is this claim being made that this is an Important Issue, such that it will be a factor in the 2020 elections.
I think this is wildly overstated.
If you had to explain to an alien why this issue was important, and would affect turnout or choices for the elections two years from now, what would you say?Report
As I said earlier…we have entered the Twilight Zone.Report
Who cares?
What the Cherokee Nation thinks? I guess nobody.
I suppose that that’s part of the criticism being levied against Warren. She’s pretending to be Native American but actual Native Americans are invisible.
If you had to explain to an alien why this issue was important, and would affect turnout or choices for the elections two years from now, what would you say?
“During the debates for the primaries for the presidential election in 2020, both Corey Booker and Kamala Harris questioned whether Elizabeth Warren pretended to be a member of a minority group. This resulted in a great deal of infighting and friction between actual members of minority groups and ‘woke’ White People who kept asking why do you people care about this?”Report
I can’t tell if you are kidding or not.
Which I guess is the point here, that this all is a Very Big Thing for the imaginary leftists who float through the minds of Fox Newsers.Report
I’m not saying it’s a “very big” thing. I’m saying it’s a thing.
We still have 21 days before the election and Warren’s DNA test will be forgotten by, oh, Thursday.
But if you think it won’t come up in the Democratic Primaries at least once, I think you’re misreading the dynamics currently at play in the Democratic Party.
Keep in mind: Elizabeth Warren released this report *VOLUNTARILY* yesterday because she thought it would ding Trump.
The “Very Big Thing” is not the DNA test. It’s that the Democratic Party frontrunners for the 2020 nomination don’t know how to read the room.Report
And yet native americans on reservations in ND remain disenfranchised. An issue which is getting far fewer pixels and is being done by one party who really really cares about native americans when it means they can dish some nasty memes.Report
Kinda makes you wonder why Warren released her DNA test instead of talking about how to better help actual Native Americans with actual Native American issues.Report
She probably has no more idea of what issues face Native Americans than any other random white person.
I spent a few months working in Cherokee North Carolina, and they deeply hated the Clintons over his 60 new death penalty offenses which, they argued, only applied to Native Americans because everyone else would be tried under state law, not federal law.
Anyway, I’d like to hear from authentic Native Americans like Heather Locklear (her last name is Tuscarora Indian, not English or Scottish), Chuck Norris, Megan Fox, Angelina Jolie, and Johnny Depp.Report
Kiinda makes me wonder why people willing run down rabbit holes talking about lesser issues and avoid bigger ones. It’s really not hard to see she did this to prep for a prez run. It’s not hard to see the right joyfully mocking and laughing and insulting native american’s yet somehow Warren is the big issue. It’s easy to see R’s preventing NA’s from voting in ND but Warren is the big issue.
My observation is native american’s don’t think the rest of america gives a crap about them. They are no doubt po’d at Warren which is completely fair. They also see lots more pressing issues that will be promptly ignored after the sleazing at and dunking on Warren.Report
It’s really not hard to see she did this to prep for a prez run.
Yesterday we knew she did this to own Trump and make him pay a million dollars.
Today we know that she was cauterizing a self-inflicted wound.
What will we know tomorrow?
One of the things that this reminds me of is Clinton’s “We’re going to put a loooot of coal companies and coal miners out of work.”
My criticism was not “she should have lied!”
My criticism was something to the effect of “holy crap, she’s very bad at this.”
If Warren’s releasing her DNA test is indicative of the current batch of Democrats and their ability to read the room, then the Democrats are in trouble.
But, again, we’re three weeks away from the election.
That’s an eternity.
And maybe there will be a Blue Wave.Report
You also have Cory Booker grandstanding during the Kavanaugh hearings and insisting multiple times that he bravely broke committee rules and the Republicans saying, “Actually, no you didn’t break any rules…”
This is how we are going to get stuck with Trump for four more years.Report
No joke! The Dems are league leaders in the own goal.Report
And we’re right back to my original point.
Namely that no one here actually cares one way or the other about her ancestry, but that we are Very Savvy Observers who are above it all, disinterested color commenters really, simply pointing out her poor strategy which will have an affect on the Man On The Street.
The absurdity is that the Man On The Street, in whose name this all is being done, is generally oblivious to any of this.
It is only the Very Savvy Observers who are excited about it, despite their best efforts to pretend otherwise.Report
That’s honestly my take on most of the liberals that were so worried about what Kavanaugh might have done to Ford. Not really concerned about Ford’s well-being, but whatever might have kept a conservative off the court…Report
In fairness, we (unlike you) also prefer supreme court justices that don’t lie under oath.Report
Namely that no one here actually cares one way or the other about her ancestry, but that we are Very Savvy Observers who are above it all, disinterested color commenters really, simply pointing out her poor strategy which will have an affect on the Man On The Street.
Which brings me back to my question:
Do you care what the Cherokee Nation has to say?Report
Sure, we should pay a lot more attention to Native issues.Report
Well, they released a statement.
They said that Elizabeth Warren’s claims to Native Americanhood were undermining tribal interests.Report
Sure. “Irrelevant bit of right wing stupidity is also false” feels good to say. Doesn’t invalidate the first part, though.
See, e.g., the “long-form birth certificate” idiocy.Report
It’s weird how the Cherokee Nation colluded with Trump on this.Report
I can believe they care. And understand why.
I cannot believe there are a meaningful number of republicans who would have a problem voting for a republican candidate with exactly these background facts, however, because I don’t believe it is something that matters to them (or any voter) except as an outrage-of-the-day talking point.Report
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that white people, Republican *OR* Democrat, really care that much about Elizabeth Warren pulling this crap.
I do think that that sort of gives away the game and *THAT* might be worth caring about… but, hey.
The only winning move is not to play, right?Report
For the same reason we don’t talk about Trump or Bush’s emails. Because this is the type of made-up faux-outrage upon which the right-wing media spin-machine thrives, and which only matters for the reasons laid out here.Report
I think it means that our political discourse is hopelessly stuck in a seemingly endless negative feedback loop of in-group virtue signaling and inane theatrics and that it is completely inadequate at addressing the myriad of very real collective action problems that will most likely mean a substantially worse off quality of life for future generations of Americans.
But maybe President Warren will fix all that. After all, she’s been one of the best senators that Facebook has ever had.Report
Yeah, pretty much.Report
I adore this comment.Report
In the end, this is what it comes down to — if you think it was honest, then it was no big deal. If you think it was because she wanted to gain an advantage from it, then she’s fair game for criticism. There’s no way to know what was actually in her head, so we can each go with whatever we prefer to believe.Report
I think the test established that she has no genetic Cherokee ancestry, as that would’ve been far more recent than 1 part in 1024, given that she’d claimed that her parents had to elope because her dad’s family, while in Oklahoma, said her mother was Cherokee and refused permission to marry. That story itself turns out to be a lie based on period newspaper accounts of the wedding, but if we have to go back six to ten generations, any Indian ancestry would likely have been from tribes along the Atlantic coast. It could even have been ancestry from a South American Indian whose children were brought back to Europe. Heck, the British royal family probably has more non-European ancestry than Warren thanks to Kate being descended from someone from India.
Most American whites have more Native American ancestry than Warren. Virtually all non-Amish Mexicans do.
Vice President of the United States Charles Curtis, who had also been president pro tem of the Senate, didn’t need to invent native American ancestry because he was descended from two chiefs, his mother was Kaw and Osage, he grew up on a reservation, and English was his third language, after Kansa and French. He was elected to the House in 1892 and won re-election six times, as an Indian who grew up on a reservation, by the people of Kansas. The Curtis Act of 1898 allowed Oklahoma to become a state. The Kansas legislature elected him to the US Senate twice, and then the people of Kansas, with the direct election of Senators, elected him too. In Washington, the whites elected him Republican whip and then majority leader in the Senate.
Somehow all this laid the grondwork for Warren claiming that her father’s family wouldn’t let her father marry an Indian, and that she’s an Indian.Report
if we have to go back six to ten generations, any Indian ancestry would likely have been from tribes along the Atlantic coast.
That makes no sense. Not that the rest of it does, either, but there’s an obvious logical hole in that particular sentence.Report
Oh? It’s like claiming your ancestor from the early 1700’s was an Apache, when white Americans hadn’t met them that far back.
Her claim was that her Oklahoma mother was so obviously Cherokee that his dad’s family wouldn’t condone the marriage, yet her mother would likely only have been 1 part in 256 or 512, and you’d have to go back almost all the way to Plymouth Rock to find one of her ancestors who was Native American.
She is “whiter” than average.Report
I think George is basically right here, but I guess it’s possible that one of her ancestors married someone of Spanish descent, and the Spanish did interact with the Cherokee much earlier. With that said, George is also correct that it is very unlikely her ancestor looked Cherokee that many generations later.Report
While we’re expressing our divergent opinions, here’s one assertion I’d like to comment on:
If someone tells you they are a man when they look like a woman, the only reasonable response is to believe they are a man unless you want to demand they show you proof.
In my view, what’s “reasonable” depends on the circumstances. What is at stake here? Writing Mr. instead of Ms. in front of their name is one thing. Athletic competition, or medical treatment, raises different issues. Do I believe Caitlyn Jenner is a woman? In some sense, yes; in other ways, no, not really.Report
Good question. I was definitely coming at the question as someone who doesn’t have a stake in the answer either way. Certainly athletic competitions and medical treatment would change that. Good point.Report
I see the whole affair as yet another sign that the only hope for America on the question of race is de-escalation of the rhetoric and renewed focus on the economics. That means on all sides. Calling her Pocahontas or Fauxcahontas or whatever is juvenile, and speaks poorly of the intellects of those who do it. For those who disagree with her politics, the line of attack should be on the merits of her policy positions. If conservatives don’t want to be called racists there is some low hanging fruit right in front of them.
Of course, the asinine stuff from the right probably wouldn’t catch nearly as much if we didn’t have a bunch of ivy leaguers grossly inflating the importance of racial identity, or flat out making up identities, to cover for the fact that they’re by and large a bunch of rich people doing well in the American system. I mentioned on the other thread that my family did the 23&me thing a couple years ago. According to the results I have some sub-Saharan African ancestry (very small, >5%). This wasn’t entirely surprising, given that a branch of my family is from the deep South. But if I ever used that fact to claim any social benefits or moral authority on anything I would fully expect and deserve all the ridicule I got.Report
This is true of culture too. My husband’s mother is visibly Native American and growing up everyone knew her family was mixed. Although she claims they never experienced any prejudice growing up, her parents did face some social pressure when they married (my husband’s parents did not, however.) She married a white guy and they live(d) a largely white lifestyle. Although her ethnic heritage is still important to her, neither of her kids care about it. One of her brothers embraced his Native heritage and was a low-level activist and even adopted Native children from their dad’s tribe.
Does one of them “deserve” their heritage more than the other?
IDK, this all starts to get really weird for me when we’re deciding who “gets to” self-ID as some genetic group and who doesn’t. Whether it’s based on genes or culture/activism.Report
What does it mean that Elizabeth Warren (like every other native Oklahoman I have ever met) has some Native American ancestry? It means nothing. It’s just a fact. The people who deny that it is a fact, or make an issue of the fact, or make false claims that Warren took advantage of the fact, are the people responsible for this being a thing.Report
That’s like saying that the people responsible for Trump are the ones who voted for him, instead of it being every liberal Democrat who ever did anything Fox can turn into a grievance.Report
Well, yes. I believe in human moral agency. Old fashioned, I know.Report
There are people who believe that Elizabeth Warren torpedoed her 2020 presidential ambitions.
It’s hard to believe that that would be the case when all she did was tell people that she, like every other native Oklahoman you’ve ever met, had a Native American ancestor somewhere between 6 and 10 generations back.
Did you hear the rumor that she claimed to be a Person of Color? Or had that rumor not made it to your neck of the woods?Report
I had heard a great many rumors about a great many things. All I know to be a fact is that she claimed some Native American ancestry, which is true. The more lurid rumors about what else she claimed, or whether she took unfair advantage of this fact, as best I have been able to determine, were false. It’s true that if enough people believe them, they could well damage her 2020 run — though the sort of people who would believe such things on the available evidence wouldn’t vote for her anyway.Report
Here’s some available evidence.
You’ll probably want to read the paragraphs around this excerpt, but here’s the excerpt:
The Boston Globe reported that Harvard listed Elizabeth Warren as a “Person of Color” according to their federally mandated diversity statistics. Here, let me quote that paragraph as well:
Is this new information for you?
Do you consider this information to be among the “false” information you’ve already been able to dismiss?Report
What Harvard did with the information, a well-known story, is on Harvard. There is no evidence that Warren herself unfairly profited from her Native American ancestry. You do understand the difference, I think.Report
I understand it enough to know that I didn’t say “she profited”.
Here, let me cut and paste what I said:
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“Story” implies she was claiming some distant ancestor was Indian.
My expectation is she actively had to check the “I’m an Indian” box on a form for it to count.Report
The way those boxes are presented is usually studiously, IMO intentionally, both wide open and neutral.
“Do you have any identification with any of the following ethnicities?” sort of a thing.
Not “Do you primarily identify as:”
Or “Your parents’ ethnic identities include:”
I am quite aware of this because I know and appreciate that I have Keralan ancestry, something I learned the details of only in adulthood (through the power of digitization of old texts, interestingly, NOT through the power of DNA testing… said ancestor’s husband wrote a 3 volume memoir that was in some college library somewhere…. so suddenly people had access to WAY more information about the people that were just names and rumors to those of us still living, before) – and I am quite intentional about when and where I include a checkmark for the South Asian or Indian or whatever they’re calling it this week box, vs where I only check the Caucasian one. Mostly I don’t check it, but there are times where it’s relevant to what is being asked (eg medical records, or census, where it seems useful to be as inclusive as possible) and then I will. Never do I think that doing so makes me Keralese in some culturally relevant or sociologically relevant way. Just, sometimes it still matters.
Now that said, one of the places I would *never* check it (which, as I said, is the majority of places) is on my work’s forms about diversity, because I am quite aware that they will use my honesty about where ALL my people (that I know about) come from to report stats to the gov’t, and worse yet the public, on how wonderfully diverse they are, and I don’t want to make that job falsely easy for anyone…. diversity should be real, and there’s no meaningful public way in which I am actually “from” South India. In any sense.
But can I imagine someone, particularly someone nearly twice my age, checking that box out of a sense of inclusivity or trust in family stories, without particularly thinking through the social justice implications of doing so, or thinking that they’re making some strong claim that should stand up to being pulled apart later? Sure, of course I can.
Doesn’t make me want to vote for her, unless the alternative is Trump, but she’s a freakin’ Harvard Law School professor in her late 70s, I was unlikely to want to vote for her anyway. If I could vote. Which (for entirely reasonable reasons) I cannot.Report
Er, in her late 60s. But my point is, this particular thing is so much less disqualifying than so many other things about *her*, before we even get started on the vastly more disqualifying things about our present President, that I don’t see why anyone cares about it.
Other than her. I can see why she does.Report
This is exactly right. She checked a box reflecting her sincere and, we now know, true belief that she had Native American ancestry. In the absence of evidence that she profited or intended to profit unfairly from this fact, why would anyone care? No creditable motive suggests itself.Report
No creditable motive suggests itself.
Regarding motives, this comment may be relevant. Or at least thought provoking. 🙂Report
She checked a box reflecting her sincere and, we now know, true belief that she had Native American ancestry.
Do you see the difference between “I have Native American ancestry” and “I am a Person of Color”?
I ask because *I* have Native American ancestry.
But I am not a Person of Color.Report
As I look at this more and more, it seems to me that there was a pretty simple way out of the box. All she had to do was say much of what you say above about her family and heritage and oral tradition… and then throw Harvard under the bus.
For me the interesting question is why doesn’t she throw Harvard under the bus? They are the ones who used her family, heritage and oral tradition to justify their diversity practices.
She has to repent of an embarrassing episode in the 90’s when Harvard made decisions that should embarrass the left… but the thing is, Harvard can double down on self-flagellation because they would agree that they were bad decisions.
Of course, it comes at an awkward time for Harvard given the lawsuit from Asian minority students… so maybe Harvard wouldn’t play ball with the obvious way out of the box?
The fact that she ignored collaborating with the Cherokee Nation… well, that’s just the sort of thing we’re supposed to judge as faulty executive decision making.
But ultimately, she’s not in any way “disqualified” from running by this – that’s purely a function of Age and not having a Kenyan birth certificate – but if the Left can’t see that her handling of the matter exposes what many perceive to be the hypocrisy (maybe even bankruptcy) of identitarian politics as evinced primarily by Harvard (again) which stands as sort of the apogee proxy for establishment institutions … well it isn’t that she can’t run, its that she’s setting herself up to run up hill both directions.
She needed to repent that she was used poorly by Harvard (and perhaps other places) to advance a diversity agenda that she as President would see as inadequate and flawed. Then she could be forgiven. Sure, the right get’s a… a… um, token of victory in pointing out Harvard perfidy in the 90’s… but hey, Harvard said some pretty stupid things about the matter. And its pretty easy for Harvard to say, you’re right… we really should have committed to our diversity goals, we too erred. So I circle back to why not throw Harvard under the bus?
Doubling down on her parents having to elope because her mother was an Indian? That’s just dumb and something about which she could have remained silent – and which I predict will be the reprise should she move forward with her candidacy. {but that’s just an observation of a second error, not the primary matter}.
So, I get what she was trying to do… but I don’t think she executed the optimal strategy and I think she flubbed her deployed strategy in a couple of different ways.
Politically, maybe the left will fill in all the gaps I mention above with a kind of mental spackle … I get that … but just because you (the collective left) know that Warren and Harvard are on your team and that they kinda botched this whole thing and really we know they would do the right thing if they could, but they can’t so why bother, and can’t we just move along? Doesn’t mean that the necessary mea culpa(s) won’t be medicine you will be forced to drink from the opposition’s cup at the time of their choosing.
So I think some on the left are missing the exposure… it isn’t the Trumpian “Pocahantas” jabs… its the fact that diversity is a rigged game and the people/institutions telling us Normies that diversity is an important thing… well, they 1) write the diversity rules to suit their objectives and 2) don’t really believe in diversity; 3) Use diversity as virtue signaling, not really to effect “change.”
Now, I get that the Left might bristle at such nonsense, but, If I may switch analogies, that’s the gap in the line that the Warren bungling opened up… any competent Team Red strategist will run through that hole all day long. There’s daylight to be seen and yards to be gathered. Team Blue either plugs the gap or sits Warren and puts someone in who can.Report
edit to clarify above that responding to Maribou for threading purposes, not specifically making her the “you” or stand-in for the Left.Report
@marchmaine Ah, ok. I also feel that she should’ve thrown Harvard under the bus (‘swhy I keep mentioning it).
See, I think (at least most of the time, when I’m not busy with self-doubt) that I’m not going to be able to answer things about that “you” because I’m not part of it – I’m part of the part of the left that has been telling the establishment that they:
“1) write the diversity rules to suit their objectives and 2) don’t really believe in diversity; 3) Use diversity as virtue signaling, not really to effect “change.””
for some time now.
So I’m not best placed to understand how they will “cover” for that, other than to keep pointing out how bad the alternative is.
Though I keep hoping they’ll listen to the part of the party that is pushing them to not be that way, and put their weight and money there… but that’s probably my Maritime crazy-utopian streak talking. At least it keeps me from despair.
And to be fair I feel like the institution where I work has made a significant shift away from that, and toward real inclusion and more care for everybody, not just the people that make them look good with minimal effort on their part*, in just the past 5 years… so there is a piece of me that’s like “hey, if we can turn THIS ship around [not yet done, but happening visibly, maybe we’re at 150 degrees of the 180 on a good day], maybe other ships can be turned around too!!”
(And it’s not like all that self-centered, self-focused diversity hasn’t helped at least *some* people… plenty of kids who never could have gone to college under the older systems, and who absolutely ran with the opportunity and became fabulous adult human beings, did get that opportunity in the make us look good era…)Report
Well, if they won’t listen to you… they certainly won’t listen to me.
But yeah… that’s my main head-scratcher… why not throw Harvard under the bus?
I’m genuinely curious whether its a blind-spot or a closed door.Report
We got to this point by making an assumption, i.e. i.e. that Harvard is at fault, that Warren didn’t deliberately turn her oral tradition into a solid written claim that she was an Indian in order to benefit from AA. This would paint her as somewhat naive, but it’s possible.
However it’s possible this assumption is incorrect and she can’t throw Harvard under the bus.Report
Sure, then why hasn’t Harvard thrown Warren under the bus?Report
Why hasn’t Harvard thrown under the bus someone who is already a powerful politician and who might be the President in a few years?Report
Sure, maybe if you’re Cornell or Dartmouth…Report
And in addition to what Jaybird pointed out, but right now it isn’t whether people will vote for her/believe in her, but rather will people start the groundswell needed to get any campaign going. And this, no matter the direction you look at it from, is not a sign of confidence.Report
One last followup:
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