Pride
should be reserved for something you achieve or obtain on your own, not
something that happens by accident of birth.
You don’t say, “I’m proud to be 5’10” or “I’m proud to have a
predisposition for colon cancer." ---George Carlin
My
prior article dealt with Warren’s September 2018 attempt to put her
embarrassing racial history story behind her.
With the help of writer Annie Linskey, the Boston Globe, and many of her
colleagues at Harvard Law School, Ms. Warren tried to persuade us that, though
she claimed to be a Cherokee at the exact moment it was becoming really, really
cool in academia to be a Cherokee, her claims had no bearing on her being hired
as a professor at Harvard Law.
Based
on my research on who gets hired at Harvard Law, the conclusion was
inescapable: there was no way Warren was hired on her merits. The ONLY reason she got the job was that she
misrepresented her racial identity. Except
for her supposed Indian ancestry, she would never have been hired, would never
have become a US Senator, and would not now be taken seriously as a
presidential candidate.
I
dislike this woman, I have many good reasons to dislike her, and I’m going to
tell you what they are. The first
reason, which grows out of her 1992 hiring at Harvard Law, is that she is a
fraud. Elizabeth Warren could have had a
nice career as a lawyer or as a law professor at a school nobody ever heard
of. Everyone says she’s a good teacher,
and there’s nothing wrong with being a good teacher.
But
that wasn’t enough. The ruthlessly
ambitious Warren decided, at the threshold of the diversity era, that she could
use her “family stories” and “high cheekbones” to catapult herself into the
limelight, and so she did.
There
was a tiny window in our history when it was possible to do this, and she took
full advantage of it. “Diversity” in
academia became an essential virtue in the early 1990s, at a time when the only
DNA testing available cost a lot of money and was used only for criminal
prosecutions and paternity disputes. DNA
testing did not become available to consumers for another twenty years. In was within this period that Elizabeth
Warren proclaimed she was a Cherokee, and there was no practical way to
challenge her assertions.
In
addition to the Boston Globe article, the other initiative in her attempt to
put the racial identity issue behind her was the release of a DNA test done for
her by Carlos Bustamante, a professor at Stanford. He concluded that a Native American ancestor
appears in Warren’s family tree “in the range of 6-10 generations ago.” In other words, Warren could possibly be 1/64th
Indian, meaning that a great-great-great-great grandparent (born sometime in
the early 1800s), might have been Indian.
Or it might have been ten generations, making her 1/1024th
part Indian, with an Indian great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great
grandparent, probably born in the mid-1700s.*
This is
one reason why tribal councils don’t care about DNA (and why the Cherokees were
so annoyed with Warren). If you want to
be a recognized member of a tribe, they insist on proof of descent from a known
tribal ancestor, and you must demonstrate it with birth and marriage
records. The other reason, of course, is
that Native Americans see things the way George Carlin did---they don’t like
the emphasis on “blood.” Blood is an
accident. Tribal or clan connections are
social links or political links or emotional bonds. They are choices. They are based in lived human experience and
not just in something you find in a test tube.
When
she released Bustamante’s results, Warren touted them on social media. Her headline: “Warren reveals test confirming
ancestry.” In a recent rally, Trump had
said, “I will give you $1 million, to your favorite charity, paid for by Trump,
if you take the test and it shows you’re an Indian.” Warren now demanded payment. In Elizabeth Warren’s mind, the test proved she was an Indian.
Let’s
do some math.
In the
first generation back, there are two people.
These are your parents. In the
second generation, there are four more people, then eight, then sixteen and so
on. Add them up. In the 10th generation back there
are 1024 people, for a total of 2046 direct
ancestors. Of these 2046 direct ancestors
of Elizabeth Warren in ten generations, ONE of them (somebody in the
mid-1700’s), was a real, honest-to-God, 100% American Indian. The rest of them, the other 2045, were
basically as pasty-white as she is, but there was that one, about 270 years ago. And that makes her a Cherokee.
Haven’t
we been here? Haven’t we done that? Is she really insisting on taking us back to
the “one-drop rule?”
Following
the OK from the Supreme Court in Plessy
v. Ferguson (1886), numerous states passed what were called Jim Crow laws
that were applicable only to white people or only to black people. Their purpose was to prevent Negroes from
voting, owning guns, living in certain areas, holding certain types of jobs,
etc.
One
problem with laws that affect only certain types of people, however, is that you
first need to pass a “racial integrity” law to determine which people are
subject to the law and which people are not.
Who is really white and who is really black? While there were jurisdictions that
distinguished among quadroons (one-fourth Negro), octoroons (one-eighth Negro),
and other “–roons” for legal purposes, most settled on the one-drop rule, which
held that if you were of mixed heritage, you were assigned to the group with
the lower social status. There’s even a
word for this rule in genealogical circles---it’s called hypodescent. Thus, if you had “one drop” of Negro blood,
you and all your descendants would forever be Negroes. This was the law in Virginia, Texas,
Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Oklahoma,
and Louisiana.**
Of
course, in the current academic world, or at least the one Warren inhabited in
the early 1990s, being Cherokee gave her an enhanced
social status, since universities were desperately seeking people of exotic
ethnicity to cement their diversity credentials and discourage students from
condemning faculty members as irredeemably racist. That was the situation at Harvard (demonstrations,
Jesse Jackson, etc.), and that’s why she was hired as a law professor.
Was
this fraud? Well, perhaps. What she did, exaggerating any evidence of
Cherokee heritage in order to advance herself professionally, was certainly
nothing to be proud of. On the other
hand, DNA testing was in its infancy and there was no “23 And Me” test on the
shelf at every Walmart, so there was no obvious or easy way to test her
suspicions. Viewed in the kindest
possible light, Warren may have believed she had some vestige of Cherokee
heritage, and then pressed her claim when it became apparent that persuading
people she was Native American might be the difference between life as a
lecturer at Eastern South Oklahoma State and life as a Professor at Harvard Law
School. If you wish to argue she was
merely behaving cynically and opportunistically, I still won’t like her, but I
will listen to that argument.
But
this is now a different matter, is it not?
Now that we know her heritage is based on a single ancestor from the
1700s or early 1800s, the insistence that her one drop is “confirmation” of Indian
identity puts her in the same intellectual camp as John C. Calhoun, George
Wallace and David Duke. Her ideas of
racial identity are identical to theirs.
Elizabeth Warren is a racist. She
believes, and she demands that we believe, that a drop of blood from 200 years
ago is a key element in her identity.
In the
quotation at the top of this article, George Carlin was mocking people who are
“proud to be Irish” or “proud to be black” or “proud to be Cherokee.” What is there to be proud of, after all,
about accidents of birth and ancestry for which we have no responsibility?
At one
level, the practice is innocuous and silly and harmless. Why not have a shot of Jameson on St. Patty’s
day? Or dress up in traditional Polish
clothes and have a parade on the Parkway to celebrate Thaddeus Kosciuszko,
whose name most people can neither spell nor pronounce? Why not?
What else were you going to do on Sunday afternoon?
But the
shot of Jameson is not really the problem.
The problem is blood politics.
The problem is Auschwitz, lynchings, Rwanda. The problem is the murder of thousands of Chinese
Uyghurs. One grim lesson of the
Twentieth Century is that the modern nation-state now has the technology to
kill millions of its own people and, given certain ideologies, will do so with
great enthusiasm and efficiency. This
capability makes the dirndls and the salsa dancing and the kielbasa and the
leprechauns a lot less cute.
This is
because the evil and the cute bits are both
impossible without the fundamental belief that you ARE what your blood says you
are. This is not to say that wearing a
dirndl on Kosciuszko Day causes genocide,
but it does mean that the belief in blood that gives rise to Kosciuszko Day is also
an essential component of genocide. In order to commit genocide, you need to
believe that a Jew (a Uyghur, a Cherokee, a whatever), is primarily, and
eternally, a member of that group, rather than an individual with unique
characteristics, hopes, beliefs, and value. If you do not believe that all those hated
people are basically the same, genocide is impossible. In a world of individuals rather than
geno-types, genocide no longer makes sense.
The
alternative to Warren’s blood politics (“identity politics,” as she might call
them), is found in the Declaration. “We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights….” This belief is the philosophical foundation
of the American experiment and the American republic---that at the most
fundamental level of human existence, of life and death and joy and suffering,
we are NOT Cherokees and we are NOT Poles or Jews or Mexicans or Rwandans. We’re just a bunch of “funny-looking people
looking for God and trying to make a living,” as my father once put it. All of us.
Copyright2020MichaelKubacki
*The ancestor, by the way, was not necessarily a
Cherokee, as Warren has always claimed.
Because of tribal movement, intermarriage and the chaos introduced by
the arrival of Europeans, there is no such thing as an identifiable Cherokee
DNA. There is only a broader category of
Native American DNA, which does not identify a particular tribe but which is clearly
distinguishable from European DNA.
**A variation on the rule [an oddly ironic one, in
this context], was Virginia’s Pocahontas Exception, which provided that you
were still considered white even if you were up to 1/16 Indian. This was because many prominent Virginia
families claimed descent from Pocahontas and her husband John Rolfe, an early
Virginia farmer.
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