By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Monday, September 30, 2019
‘I have listened and I have learned” said Elizabeth
Warren at a forum of Native American voters in Iowa last month. “Like anyone
who’s being honest with themselves, I know that I have made mistakes. I am
sorry for the harm I have caused.” Did any reporter ask her what harm,
specifically, she’d caused, or what, specifically, she’d learned? Did any
reporter ask her if her “mistakes” were ones anyone could have made, or ones
she believed any of her peers, either at Harvard or in the Senate, had also
made?
No, they did not.
I suppose people think that the controversy over Warren’s
past claims of Native American ancestry has been put to bed, with Warren rising
in the polls because she has plans for everything, including for Native
Americans. But in fact, the controversy has not been put to bed, and it
shouldn’t be. It points to Elizabeth Warren’s ambitions and lack of integrity,
and forces us to ponder whether the rules really apply to those who would make
them.
The media have certainly done their best to help Warren
in putting the controversy to bed, though. The Boston Globe — in a story
that briefly acknowledged that Warren’s “political enemies have long pushed a
narrative that her unsubstantiated claims of Native American heritage
turbocharged her legal career” — gave ample space to her own
much-more-charitable version of events. Her reporter-defenders have pointed out
that until a certain time in her life, she declined to participate in
affirmative-action programs, though even they have had to admit that the
crucial leaps in her academic career — her landing a job at the University of
Pennsylvania and then moving on to Harvard — occurred after she began listing
herself as a racial minority. The year before Harvard Law School hired her —
and trumpeted her as the first woman of color so hired — it had been subject to
major, headline-grabbing protests for giving tenure to four white men.
Of course, Warren could have been deluding herself as
well. She claims that her belief in her Cherokee heritage came from
longstanding family lore. But the fact that she participated in the
now-cringe-inducing Pow Wow Chow cookbook and plagiarized
her recipes from a French cookbook suggests a certain awareness that she was
perpetrating a racial fraud. And then there is the fact that Cherokee Indian is
not so much a “socially constructed” racial category as a specific, legally
defined identity: You are a Cherokee when the Cherokee nation recognizes you as
a member on its rolls. Surely someone who identified as a Native American
academically and socially in the way Warren once claimed she did would have
sought such official status. But she didn’t.
Warren has repeatedly claimed over the years that her
parents’ marriage was rejected by racist grandparents because of her mother’s
Cherokee ancestry. But Cherokee genealogist Twila Barnes has said there’s
simply no evidence of Cherokee genealogy in Warren’s family. Warren’s mother
was not some racial outcast, but the popular daughter of a prominent local
family. And there’s no evidence of the romantic elopement, or racist animus on
the part of her paternal grandfather, Grant Herring, who regularly
played golf with Carnal Wheeling, a recognized Cherokee.
The media haven’t really known how to handle this story.
Like a Geiger counter in a North Korean nuclear-weapons lab, the reaction of
the “smart set” on Twitter was wildly disconcerting when Elizabeth Warren
announced the results of her spectacularly ill-conceived DNA test earlier this
year. At first, the trace amounts of Native American heritage were held up as
proof against Donald Trump’s attacks. Then, as geneticists and common sense
intervened in the discussion, it became obvious that Warren’s Native American
roots were negligible.
As the social-climbing Warren begins to gain over actual
socialist Bernie Sanders, I expect the Sandernistas to unload on the
contradictions between the upwardly mobile Left’s hatred of cultural
appropriation and the changing racial identity and falsified family history of
its darling Warren. If she survives that and wins the nomination, she’ll face a
general election in which the same basic problem remains.
I predict that should she make it that far, everyone will
just try to change the subject.
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