If all goes well, Elizabeth Warren’s triumphant discovery that she is 99.9% white and therefore was justified in representing herself as a “person of color." for institutional diversity purposes will sink her career aspirations as deep as they deserve to be sunk. The fact that so much of the mainstream media is willing to have their credibility brought down with her is indicative of how stupid bias will make people. The Daily Beast, for example, writes in a headline, “Warren revealed results show Native American heritage Monday.."
Keep it up, guys. Pretty soon the jig will be up for identify politics, since if 1/1,024th Native American means “Native American heritage,." then everyone is “of color." somehow. In that case, perhaps we’ll owe Warren a debt of gratitude….
Warren had an easy out of this mangled story: She should/could have said that she believed her family’s telling of the events and, being originally from Oklahoma, it would be reasonable to believe that she had Native American heritage.* But, she elaborated on the story, to make it more compelling. She also told interviewers her father’s parents did not approve of his choice for a wife because her mother was Cherokee.**
Warren is a lawyer and, supposedly, is very bright. If you’ve watched or listened to CNN and MSNBC for the last four years or so, she is the very embodiment of moral authority over all things . . . erm . . . moral, guided by a passionate desire to help the poor and the middle class.
She knew, and reasonably should have know, that DNA is not determinative of Native American heritage. What matters is being included in the tribes’ relevant hereditary scrolls. In fact, she said that in an interview, so she was aware of the standard and she is aware that she is not so listed.
Yet, Warren used her family’s yarn to promote her career. Harvard Law School didn’t make up that she was “person of color."; they got it from her. She exploited it and used it to her benefit. Now, she is shown to be the fraud that she is (and the one I have always known she is – she would speak at the University of Texas Jay Westbrook bankruptcy Continuing Legal Education seminars, specifically intending to drive me crazy).
Warren took a political gamble by releasing tenuous results showing a possible connection to Native American heritage, hoping it would put the matter to bed before she reluctantly announced that she would run for President, to save us all from Trump and the nastiness he has wrought large on the country. Sadly, it failed spectacularly, providing ammunition to her critics that she is not ready for prime time.***
In addition to outing her grandparents as bigots, Warren has demonstrated she cannot be trusted. She used that yarn to get hired by Harvard Law School, paying her somewhere around $400,000 per year. How is that not fraud? How is that not conclusive evidence of bad character? How is that not signature significance that she cannot be trusted with the Office of the Presidency?
*Ed. Note: My mother always told us her maternal grandfather left Ireland to escape punishment for his criminal involvement in the IRA. We had no reason to doubt it when we were young. Only later did we look it up and find out that it was simply my mother telling a tall tale, learning that her relatives immigrated to the US in the late 1800s as a result of famine and before the IRA took on the separatist movement it turned into in the 20th century.
** Ed. Note Two: Now, think about that. She threw her paternal grandparents under the bus, declaring publicly that they were vicious bigots. What does that say about her ambition? If she is willing to annihilate her paternal grandparents, just think of what she will do to people she likes.
***Ed. Note. Three: Speaking of SNL, will they run a skit this weekend showing just how idiotic this whole episode is? If suspect not.