Most of us stopped playing pretend during adolescence. But Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is still at it, playing Candidates and Indians and deciding to be both. Her claim to the latter status was buttressed, according to her, by a DNA test she says she took showing that she’s maybe one percent, or perhaps 0.01 percent (1/1,024th), American Indian, having had such an ancestor six to 10 generations ago — probably.
It’s a family-tree story right up there with the Dark Helmet character’s statement in Star Wars spoof Spaceballs: “Before you die there is something you should know about us, Lone Starr…. I am your father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate.”
And Helmet’s reply to Lone Starr’s question, “What’s that make us?” applies to Warren as well: “Absolutely nothing.”
This didn’t stop Warren from digging her hole deeper with her recent DNA-test move. She thought it would aid her likely White House bid after President Trump, mocking her as Pocahontas (Fauxcahontas, actually) in June, offered to give $1 million to her desired charity if a DNA test shows she’s an Indian. It has instead brought mockery. But the question is, as American Thinker’s Ed Straker asks, why would liberals “rather be 1% American Indian than 99% white,” anyway?
Adding perspective, he also writes, “Are there American Indians who are 1% white who want to be called white? I think not.”
It’s all, he concludes, “a symptom of the deeper racial illness that infects American culture, which celebrates nonwhite identities over white ones.”
Straker talks about how being white in this racialist age of “white-privilege” theory and Caucasian-free safe spaces is unfashionable. As he puts it:
In America today, white people are considered suspect racists at best, guilty until proven innocent. Even if they aren’t consciously racist, we are told they may harbor unconscious racism, which conveniently can never be purged, or detected, but is always there — just like man-made global warming.
Minorities, however, are virtuous because they are by definition oppressed. Any minority living in America is deemed to have been discriminated against by white people. You just have to be careful about defining what a minority is. A person from Slovakia or Ireland or Norway is not a minority. These people are simply white.
… And then there is the P.C. cultural propaganda that shows nonwhites and nonwhite culture to be superior to European-American norms.
While this is true, there’s still more to it. The most Machiavellian motivation just may be a desire to gain power. To do this it helps to destroy the current power structure, and to do that you must demonize it.
Now, in relatively homogenous but poorer (than us) countries, such as 1917 Russia, racial division won’t work but class division will. So you attack the bourgeoisie. This isn’t as effective in the rich United States (though that card is still played), but racial appeals can hit pay dirt. And with our power structure being largely white — expected since America has historically been approximately 85 percent white — and older and male, is it surprising that today’s most maligned group is old white males?
Warren’s motivation, however, was more personal and mercenary. She was trying to cash in on our racial spoils system (i.e., quotas, affirmative action), which, via her leftist agitation, she helped perpetuate and strengthen. Talk about a conflict of interest.
Far be it from Warren to have left her Harvard professorship for an actual minority, her claiming of the status for herself, combined with being female, gave her the Daily Double of victim-group points. And sure enough, Harvard Law School touted her in 1997 as its first “woman of color,” which only proves that, aside from 30 more I.Q. points, university officials also needed new glasses.
Less impressed by Warren’s Fauxcahontas fictions was the Cherokee Nation, which stated that she was “undermining tribal interests” with her “continued claims of tribal heritage.” The Cherokees also pointed out that current “DNA tests do not even distinguish whether a person’s ancestors were indigenous to North or South America.”
So using the Left’s own terminology, we can say that Warren is appropriating a minority group’s cultural and ethnic heritage for personal gain. Isn’t that among the worst of white sins?
But she’s not alone. Counterfeit Indian Ward Churchill, ex-ethnic studies professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, did the same. So did Rachel Dolezal, who masqueraded as black and had a position with the NAACP. These people monetize a racial identity — sort of like a 1920s minstrel actor.
Speaking of identity, can we accept reality? Many mock the world’s Dolezals, but how much different are they from people who claim a racial status based on the one-drop rule? And how is someone who’s 10 percent one race defined by it when he’s 90 percent another race?
What’s being said is that this is about identification, not anthropological science; it’s thus little different from the “transgender” agenda. Hey, if Warren can advance herself by claiming “woman of color” status, why can’t a man advance himself by claiming female status and entering (and winning) a women’s bike race?
The point? If race is a reality — and contrary to those who deny such, it does appear so — it’s an objective reality. It then is what it is, not what we want it to be.
And if the truth hurts, this one is hurting Warren. Far from her racial contrivance being the political coup she’d hoped, the mockery has been brutal. Comedic pundit Ann Coulter had perhaps the tweet of the week:
Then there’s this Coulter gem:
Her respondents chimed in with the following:
Then there’s this from yours truly:
And the normally staid Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) found his funny bone relating his own DNA test results:
Even some in the liberal media were unimpressed. As Fox News host Tucker Carlson reported on his show’s Tuesday edition (video below. Relevant portion begins at 2:12), introducing Warren as the “head of the #MeSioux movement”:
So while Senator Warren had hoped her Fauxcahontas fiction would help her climb the political totem pole, it may turn out that for her, DNA will mean “Demagogues needn’t apply.”
