October 17, 2018 at 4:32 p.m.
We're all Native Americans now
We're all Native Americans now
As it turns out, most Americans can now claim themselves to be Native American. At least we can if we adopt the standard being used by Democratic Massachusetts Senator and potential presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren.
According to her just released DNA test that she says proves her claim that she is Native American, Warren is likely somewhere between 1/64th Native American to 1/1,024th Native American, and that's proof enough for her.
So go ahead, change your professional profile to Native American from white. It can't hurt in a diversity-thirsty world.
We're kidding, of course, but that is exactly what Warren did over the years. As both The Boston Globe and its columnist Jeff Jacoby have pointed out, Warren "had her ethnicity changed from white to Native American at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she taught from 1987 to 1995, and at Harvard University Law School, where she was a tenured faculty member starting in 1995."
For years, Jacoby writes, Warren had herself listed as "Native American" in directories of law professors. In 1996, a Harvard law school spokesperson identified Warren as a Native American woman, while the Fordham Law Review described her as Harvard Law's "first woman of color."
All of which is very odd because we all know Elizabeth Warren is very, very white.
Which, in turn, has prompted criticism not only from actual Native Americans, but from President Donald Trump, who long ago christened her "Pocahontas." Even a real descendant of Pocahontas, Debbie White Dove Porreco, has called on Warren to apologize to, well, everyone.
Instead of apologizing, Pocahontas, ur, Warren decided to double down on her claim, and this week she tripled down by producing that DNA test she said proved her Indian (specifically Cherokee) heritage once and for all.
And just what did this test show? It depends on who you ask. Debbie White Dove Porreco, the descendant of Pocahontas, says it proves Warren isn't the Cherokee Indian she claims to be. On the other hand, if we use Warren's standard, almost every European American can claim to be Native American.
Specifically, Warren's DNA suggests - note that the word 'suggests' was used in the analysis - that somewhere between six and 10 generations ago, a Native American appeared in her family tree.
That would put the percentage of her American Indian DNA at between 1.5 percent and 0.09 percent, the same as most European Americans. Indeed, according to a 2015 study, the genome-wide ancestry of European Americans is on average .18 percent Native American, so Warren's could well be less than average.
The bottom line is, if Elizabeth Warren is native American, so is your typical white European American.
That is most assuredly not the case, and neither is she. In fact, as Jacoby writes, using a speck of DNA to determine racial or ethnic identity is a racist trope, for in post-Reconstruction America the idea that a person was black if he or she had "one drop" of African blood was a pillar of segregation.
No wonder Indian activists and tribal leaders are incensed. And incensed they are: The Cherokee nation immediately issued a blistering retort.
"A DNA test is useless to determine tribal citizenship," said Cherokee Nation secretary of state Chuck Hoskin Jr. "Current DNA tests do not even distinguish whether a person's ancestors were indigenous to North or South America."
Sovereign tribal nations set their own legal requirements for citizenship, Hoskin said, and while DNA tests can be used to determine lineage, such as paternity to an individual, it is not evidence for tribal affiliation.
Simply put, Hoskin said, using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or to any tribal nation is inappropriate and wrong.
"It makes a mockery out of DNA tests and its legitimate uses while also dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven," he said. "Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage."
By wrongly and immorally appropriating the culture and heritage of an oppressed people, Warren the White is also seriously setting back the efforts of those who fight against legitimate and persistent injustice. In other words, Warren, that self-proclaimed social justice warrior, just shot the social justice movement in the head.
It seems the social-justice movement is taking a lot of friendly fire these days. The McCarthyist smear of Brett Kavanaugh has seriously damaged not only Democrats but the #MeToo movement, as the terrain of credibility shifted significantly during the witch hunt.
To be sure, the #MeToo movement has been and must always be undergirded by a foundation of due process in its legitimate crusade against predatory men. Expelling due process from its membership in #MeToo merely transforms a movement into a mob.
And a mob is always about partisan motive, not justice.
Finally, when it comes to injuring the movement for social justice, Hillary Clinton this week simply could not let Elizabeth Warren get the best of her. In a remarkable interview with CBS, Clinton defended Bill Clinton's affair with his intern, Monica Lewinsky, all those years ago because she was 21.
Asked if Clinton's affair with Lewinsky was an abuse of power, Clinton replied, "No, no, she was an adult."
She was also a young intern to the most powerful person on the planet Earth. Hillary Clinton's position would seem to absolve any powerful man using his position to "seduce," in the most perverted sense of the term, or participate in sexual activity with a young intern, you know, as long as she's 21 and in the end consents.
Earlier this year Lewinsky herself anticipated this line of thinking in Vanity Fair: "There are even some people who feel my White House experiences don't have a place in this movement, as what transpired between Bill Clinton and myself was not sexual assault, although we now recognize that it constituted a gross abuse of power."
Abuse is abuse, and this abuse was sexual, if not sexual assault. It's funny the way victims and predators are defined by liberals - subjectively and according to their partisan political agendas. Monica Lewinsky is not a victim of abuse, and the women who accused Bill Clinton of rape are not to be believed, while any accuser of Brett Kavanaugh and others like him must be believed and must consent to the destruction of their careers.
What we are seeing with all the social justice warriors firing at their own troops is what you usually see when a movement abandons objectivity in favor of subjectivity. In authentic movements for justice, due process, evidence, and objective standards of measurement are the cornerstones of justice, while, in movements governed by subjective standards, the truth lies in the eyes of the beholders - those who lead those movements.
And so Elizabeth Warren can use racism to advance her political career even as she routinely denounces racism in other sectors of society. Democratic apologists can call for due process in some abuse allegations (see Keith Ellison in Minnesota) while denouncing it elsewhere, and Hillary Clinton can see abuses of power all across America but not in her own home.
The problem with subjectivity as the foundation of justice is that it inevitably shifts like the sands and leads to double standards. And, sooner or later, protecting a double standard requires killing all the witnesses, even your own.
To slay Trump's pejorative put-down of her as Pocahontas, Warren had to take aim at every Native American in the U.S. I guess it didn't matter to her because, after all, by her standard, we're all Native Americans now.
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