Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has long claimed to be of Native American heritage despite her obvious European whiteness. Genealogists, native tribal experts, and even the President of the United States have debunked this claim, but nevertheless she persisted. Even after taking a DNA test showing that she has less Native American blood than the average white American, Warren continued to insist she had strong Native American lineage. Because cultural appropriation looks bad on a the resumé of a presidential candidate, Warren has made the stunning admission that she is not in fact a minority.
Warren’s cover story has always been that her parents had to elope because her mother was a Cherokee Indian and her father’s racist family didn’t approve of the marriage. As a professor at Harvard Law school Warren listed her race/ethnicity as Native American and the school promoted her as a diversity hire. President Trump, who calls her “Pocahontas” challenged Warren to take a DNA test and she fell for the bait.
The release of the DNA test showed that Warren my be 1/1024th American Indian, which is a much lower percentage that the average white American of European decent. Despite this embarrassment, she continued to claim her mother was Cherokee and that she was also.
All of this changed on Friday when Warren dropped the charade that she’s and Indian princess. The Washington Post reports that Warren delivered the commencement speech at historically black college Morgan State University:
“I’m not a person of color. And I haven’t lived your life or experienced anything like the subtle prejudice, or more overt harm, that you may have experienced just because of the color of your skin,” said Warren.
She didn’t come right out and say that she isn’t a Cherokee Indian, but close enough. She admitted that she isn’t a person of color and that she hasn’t experienced prejudice because of her race. She basically stood up an said the the is a white person and admitting she has a problem is the first step toward recovery.
The question is, why did Warren suddenly come clean when she’s been so stubbornly defiant about her lie? The Washington Post seems to think it’s related to her desire to run for president in 2020.
Her speech comes as Warren is mulling a White House bid and trying to regain her footing after stoking outrage on the left by releasing a DNA test in October intended to prove she has Native American ancestry. The test angered some minority leaders who found it offensive that she would use genetics to prove ethnicity.
The blowback from releasing the test halted Warren’s momentum as an early Democratic favorite for 2020, and she is trying to focus on policy and strengthening ties to nonwhite communities.
Recently, Warren’s hometown paper, The Boston Globe, argued that Warren should reconsider running for president because her DNA test/fake heritage claim was disqualifying.
“While Warren is an effective and impactful senator with an important voice nationally, she has become a divisive figure. A unifying voice is what the country needs now after the polarizing politics of Donald Trump,” wrote the Globe editors.
So it’s not so much that Warren has finally realized it’s wrong to co-op a people’s culture; she just wants to be president and pretending to be Native American is bad optics. She can’t run on a platform that President Trump is racist when she is engaged in the racism of cultural appropriation so she’s pretending like she isn’t pretending that she’s Cherokee.
While it’s not shocking that Elizabeth Warren isn’t a minority, everyone already knew that, it is kind of stunning that she finally admitted she’s a pale face. Well, it would be if it wasn’t part of her ruse to run for president. Warren is so duplicitous that even when she tells the truth, she’s still lying.
