On the Criticism of Elizabeth Warren for Publicizing her DNA Test Results [View all]

[Time for change]

I find the criticisms of Elizabeth Warren for publicizing her DNA test results to be so inappropriate that I suspect them to be largely if not totally politically motivated.


Criticisms

There are two lines of criticism that I am aware of. One is a criticism – unsupported by any evidence that I have ever seen or heard, notwithstanding the repeated assertions of perhaps the most bigoted man to ever occupy the U.S. Presidency – discussed in an ABC News article by Chris Francescani, provocatively titled “The real problem with Elizabeth Warren’s DNA Test: Geneticists”. That article notes allegations that Warren has used her assertions of Native American heritage to further her career – such as to obtain school scholarships, jobs, or tax relief (Unlike Trump, Warren has made her tax returns public).

The other line of criticism, also noted in the ABC News article, goes along the following lines:

“… using DNA to claim an ancestral affiliation with Native Americans contravenes contemporary notions of Native American identity, and to some in the Native American community is simply insulting… Some experts… saw Warren’s DNA test as an affront to Native Americans’ spiritual heritage, which is based on long and deeply-held tribal beliefs that the tribes have for centuries occupied the land on which their reservations sit”.

Really? Warren’s DNA test result somehow has something to do with Native American claims to their ancestral lands?


Warren’s Defense

Regarding the allegation that Warren has used assertions of Native American heritage for political or financial gain, she says “Let me be clear I have never asked for, never got any benefit because of my heritage. The people who hired me have all said they didn’t even know about it”. The Boston Globe has backed her up on that:

In the most exhaustive review undertaken of Elizabeth Warren’s professional history, the Globe found clear evidence, in documents and interviews, that her claim to Native American ethnicity was never considered by the Harvard Law faculty, which voted resoundingly to hire her, or by those who hired her to four prior positions at other law schools. At every step of her remarkable rise in the legal profession, the people responsible for hiring her saw her as a white woman.

Warren has not made a big deal about her claim to Native American heritage. In her book, “This Fight Is our Fight – The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class”, she uses deeply personal anecdotes from her life experiences to help make many of her points. It includes a 4-page sub-section titled “Fight Bigotry”, which includes a discussion of the bigotry stirred up by our current president, and concludes:

“It isn’t enough to declare in private that our own hearts are good. We stand up in public for those who are attacked and we call on others to stand up. That’s how we tell ourselves who we are. That’s how we let the rest of the world know what we stand for”.

In another section of the book she notes briefly, presumably to make a more personal statement about bigotry, that her father’s parents objected to the marriage of her parents because of her mother’s Native American heritage, but they eloped anyhow.

Her decision to get DNA tested was spurred only by Donald Trump’s repeated ridiculing of her claim, by mockingly referring to her as “Pocahontas”. Trump also promised Warren, in one of his typical rambling semi-coherent statements at one of his rallies (though the statement was more coherent than his statements often are), that if someday he was in a public debate with her, he would agree to donate a million dollars to her favorite charity “if you take the {DNA} test and it shows you’re an Indian”.

Interpreting Trump’s claim as promising to donate a million dollars to charity if she produced a DNA test positive for Native American heritage (whether or not her interpretation of his promise was correct is not my point), Warren publicly released a report by a Stanford University professor who analyzed her DNA sample and concluded “strong evidence” of Native American ancestry from 6-10 generations ago.

It is important to point out, in response to the criticism that the DNA evidence that Warren presented
was not definitively conclusive, and that even if it was, it says nothing about her being actively affiliated with any Native American tribe, that Warren never made any such claims. She only presented the DNA evidence and her mother’s assertion to her of Native American heritage when she was a child, regarding her heritage. Her only reason for publicly revealing the test result was to rebuke the President of the United States for his repeated mocking of her over a period of more than two years, and to request that he pay up on his promise. It may also be significant that she designated a Native American charity devoted to protecting Native American women against violence, for him to send the money to.

Only towards the end of Francescani’s article, following ad nauseum repetitions of criticisms, especially including reasons why DNA tests of Native American heritage are not definitively conclusive, does Francescani present a contrary view. He states, “Not all Native American leaders, however, have been publicly critical of Warren’s DNA testing”. He then goes on to cite the comments of Eastern Band of Cherokee Principal Chief Richard Sneed:

“Senator Warren has not tried to appropriate Cherokee or Delaware culture. She has not used her family story of evidence of Native ancestry to gain employment or other advantage… On the contrary, she demonstrates respect for tribal sovereignty by acknowledging that tribes determine citizenship and respecting the difference between citizenship and ancestry.”

Sneed went on to note that Warren has sponsored legislation to help prevent suicides in Native American populations, identify missing and murdered Native American women, and help tribes reacquire land they once owned.

Certainly, Native Americans living in the United States have a lot to be sensitive about, and wary about the motives of white Americans. As described in detail in “American Holocaust – The Conquest of the New World”, by David E. Stannard, between 1492 and 1890, men of European ancestry (including those constituting the United States of America) perpetrated a genocide against the natives of the “New World” that amounted to the loss of approximately 100 million Native American lives, which represented approximately 95% of the population that existed in 1492. Numerically, that is far more extensive than the Nazi Holocaust, and spread out over a longer period of time (though certainly if the Nazis hadn’t been defeated, their Holocaust would have been far more extensive and much longer than it was).

But why be angry with Elizabeth Warren, a woman without a bigoted bone in her body, for merely announcing the result of her DNA testing in response to unceasing mocking of her by the most famous bigot in the world today? I would like to know if those who criticize Warren for announcing her DNA test result have ever criticized Donald Trump for his crude mockery of her and every ethnic minority group in our country. And I would also like to know whether those same people ever criticized the Republicans of North Dakota for their recent efforts to disenfranchise the Native Americans of North Dakota in order to win a U.S. Senate election. If not, I would like to know why not. It seems crystal clear to me that those people warrant far more criticism than does Elizabeth Warren for anything that she ever did.