Cherokee Nation Angered by Sen. Warren’s Releasing DNA Results

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“A DNA test is useless to determine tribal citizenship,” said Chuck Hoskin Jr., the Nation’s secretary of state on Monday, in response to Warren’s announcement.

Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong. It makes a mockery out of DNA tests and its legitimate uses while also dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is prove.

Why Elizabeth Warren’s Genealogy a Serious Issue

Many on the left view race-bases hiring as an important means of facilitating diversity, believing it helps ensure fairness, David Harsanyi, senior editor at The Federalist, reminds readers.

… few people (Sen. Warren) exhibit as much certitude, and gain as many benefits, over a claim that’s so obscure and unverifiable.

She then latched on to this negligible history to gain traction in an academic field that was searching for more diversity in their candidates.

It was Warren who made it all an issue. We don’t fully know how important Warren’s claims were in her career. There is, however, much evidence that her self-driven minority claims in the 1990s were helpful. Warren, who once maintained her family had “high cheekbones like all of the Indians do,” was listed as a “minority faculty member” by The University of Pennsylvania. She had the school switch her designation from white to Native American. Warren self-identified as a “minority” in the legal directory, and Harvard Law School preposterously listed her as one of the “women of color” the school had hired. On job applications, Warren was very specific in claiming that she had Cherokee and Delaware Indian ancestry.

Acting as if the results of the test are a vindication of her initial claims, as so many journalists are now framing it, is an assault on reason.

How Warren’s Minority Status Claims Helped Her

Claiming minority status did and does have value to Warren, writes Ben Shapiro in NRO.

Her Native American ancestry claims may not have been a factor in her hiring at Harvard Law, but the University of Pennsylvania listed Warren’s 1994 teaching award in its Minority Equity Report. Harvard Law listed her as Native American in the university’s annual affirmative-action report; administrators listed her as such from 1995 to 2004. It took real action from Warren herself to be listed as Native American at the institutions at which she worked. Minority status adds luster to a résumé in academia.

The Ugliness of Identity Politics

Elizabeth Warren’s saga exemplifies the ugly new identity politics that dominates the Left, continues Ben Shapiro. It drove one of their own, Warren, to radical dishonesty to avoid being cast out of the club and discarded as “just another privileged white woman.”