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Elizabeth Warren – Caricature by DonkeyHotey, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0/Original
As Joe Cunningham posted earlier today, Elizabeth Warren has finally submitted to DNA testing to support her facially ridiculous claim that she is Cherokee and the test found, surprise, that she’s as white as the average hotel bed sheet. That has led to another media frenzy to protect this harridan and to call out Trump for something he’s correct about.
To appreciate the extent of this lie perpetrated by Warren and amplified by the media, let’s look at her claim.
It was Warren who made it all an issue. We don’t fully know how important Warren’s claims were in her career. There is, however, much evidence that her self-driven minority claims in the 1990s were helpful. Warren, who once maintained her family had “high cheekbones like all of the Indians do,” was listed as a “minority faculty member” by The University of Pennsylvania. She had the school switch her designation from white to Native American. Warren self-identified as a “minority” in the legal directory, and Harvard Law School preposterously listed her as one of the “women of color” the school had hired. On job applications, Warren was very specific in claiming that she had Cherokee and Delaware Indian ancestry.
When her supposed Native American heritage came under scrutiny during her first Senate bid, Warren presented a recipe she had published in her cousin’s cookbook as evidence of her background. It was signed “Elizabeth Warren — Cherokee.” Later we learned that even the recipe was taken verbatim from an article in The New York Times five years earlier.
Warren has claimed to be 1/32 Cherokee:
Warren says, yes, she is, and points to “family stories” passed down to her through generations as evidence.
“I am very proud of my heritage,” Warren told NPR in 2012. “These are my family stories. This is what my brothers and I were told by my mom and my dad, my mammaw and my pappaw. This is our lives. And I’m very proud of it.”
In that account and others, a genealogist traced Warren’s Native American heritage to the late 19th century, which, if true, would make her 1/32 Native American. (However, the legitimacy of those findings has been debated.)
Note: this is the second math error the Boston Globe had had to make. The best Warren can be, high cheekbones and all, is 1/64 Indian.
THANK YOU for the updated correction @BostonGlobe @AnnieLinskey! pic.twitter.com/vmCse7CuAJ
— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) October 15, 2018
Her claim of any Cherokee descent has been thoroughly debunked by no less than The Atlantic, and yet she persisted:
https://twitter.com/seanmdav/status/1051854177977229314
Good time to re-up my article from last March.
Sen. Warren claimed her grandparents were anti-Indian bigots who opposed her parents' marriage because her mom was obviously Native American.
Does this story match with her (alleged) DNA test results? https://t.co/t79xXkKr7e
— Larry O'Connor (@LarryOConnor) October 15, 2018
Now let’s look at what her DNA test determined:
The inherent imprecision of the six-page DNA analysis could provide fodder for Warren’s critics. If her great-great-great-grandmother was Native American, that puts her at 1/32nd American Indian. But the report includes the possibility that she’s just 1/1024th Native American if the ancestor is 10 generations back.
…
Detecting DNA for Native Americans is particularly tricky because there is an absence of Native American DNA available for comparison. This is in part because Native American leaders have asked tribal members not to participate in genetic databases.“The tribes have felt they have been exploited,” explained Lawrence Brody, a senior investigator with the Medical Genomics and Metabolic Genetics Branch at the National Institutes of Health. “The amount of genetic data that is available from Native Americans is sparse.”
To make up for the dearth of Native American DNA, Bustamante used samples from Mexico, Peru, and Colombia to stand in for Native American. That’s because scientists believe that the groups Americans refer to as Native American came to this land via the Bering Strait about 12,000 years ago and settled in what’s now America but also migrated further south. His report explained that the use of reference populations whose genetic material has been fully sequenced was designed “for maximal accuracy.”
“To make up for the dearth of Native American DNA, Bustamante used samples from Mexico, Peru, and Colombia to stand in for Native American.” #SeñoritaWarren https://t.co/KJTj3uRev3
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) October 15, 2018
More to the point, assuming the DNA test measures American Indian (btw, I refuse to use the “Native American” label, my ancestors came here in 1636, I am native American) DNA at all, Warren is less Indian than your average white guy:
The researchers found that European-Americans had genomes that were on average 98.6 percent European, .19 percent African, and .18 Native American.
So Elizabeth Warren is *possibly* 1/1024 (0.09%) Native American.
Scientists say the average European-American is 0.18% Native American. (https://t.co/XU0l1JQO1L)
That'd make Warren even less Native American than the average European-American.
— Michael Ahrens (@michaelahrens) October 15, 2018
This brings us to the inevitable hand waving to make us forget that Elizabeth Warren is a liar and try to gaslight us into thinking that Trump was blowing smoke.
FLASHBACK: President Trump on Elizabeth Warren, 7/5/2018: "I will give you a million dollars to your favorite charity, paid for by Trump, if you take the test and it shows you’re an Indian." https://t.co/WNdyvfgaYd pic.twitter.com/ToAd1qaQJl
— The Hill (@thehill) October 15, 2018
“I’m going to get one of those little [DNA testing] kits and in the middle of the debate, when she proclaims she’s of Indian heritage…,” Trump said. “And we will say, ‘I will give you a million dollars to your favorite charity, paid for by Trump, if you take the test and it shows you’re an Indian.’ ”
The crowd cheered.
“And let’s see what she does,” Trump continued. “I have a feeling she will say no, but we’ll hold that for the debates. Do me a favor. Keep it within this room?”
Elizabeth Warren releases results of a DNA test to @AnnieLinskey showing “strong evidence” of Native American blood, trying to put Trump’s “Pocahontas” routine to rest https://t.co/2xh2CAfuPH
— Philip Rucker (@PhilipRucker) October 15, 2018
Elizabeth Warren releases her DNA test results and dares Trump to make good on his $1 million bet https://t.co/Yn2RrHgy3i
— Vox (@voxdotcom) October 15, 2018
Here's what Elizabeth Warren's DNA test shows – and why #Trump owes $1 million he lost on that bet. https://t.co/Mqqp1hR5ZO via @nypost
— Barbara Hoffman (@BHoffman_NYPost) October 15, 2018
https://twitter.com/ishapiro/status/1051840780292288513
This really hits the nail on the head. During the Jim Crow era, in order to define who was black, the “one-drop” rule was instituted.
To be considered black in the United States not even half of one’s ancestry must be African black. But will one-fourth do, or one-eighth, or less? The nation’s answer to the question ‘Who is black?” has long been that a black is any person with any known African black ancestry. This definition reflects the long experience with slavery and later with Jim Crow segregation. In the South it became known as the “one-drop rule,” meaning that a single drop of “black blood” makes a person a black. It is also known as the “one black ancestor rule,” some courts have called it the “traceable amount rule,” and anthropologists call it the “hypo-descent rule,” meaning that racially mixed persons are assigned the status of the subordinate group. This definition emerged from the American South to become the nation’s definition, generally accepted by whites and blacks. Blacks had no other choice. As we shall see, this American cultural definition of blacks is taken for granted as readily by judges, affirmative action officers, and black protesters as it is by Ku Klux Klansmen.
Let’s review the facts.
Warren is not Cherokee.
Warren may or may not have some American Indian genetic material, but the baseline sample isn’t definitively American Indian.
There is no genealogical evidence that Warren is American Indian of any type.
Elizabeth Warren DNA test does NOT prove she’s Native American, contrary to the hype https://t.co/pzcnb2zsZP pic.twitter.com/24lnwn4lQZ
— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) October 15, 2018
Read this whole thread:
Every Time Elizabeth Warren Has Lied About Her Native American Heritage:
(Thread)
1. Elizabeth Warren self-identified as a "Native American" in the The Association of American Law Schools Directory of law professors in every edition printed between 1986 -1995.
— Benny (@bennyjohnson) October 15, 2018
What Warren’s fluffers are demanding is that we agree that she is American Indian based on a DNA test that a) doesn’t include DNA from American Indians, and b) which shows that she is no more American Indian than anyone else.
Trump’s million dollars are pretty safe.
https://twitter.com/EWErickson/status/1051836566799175681
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