I agree the DNA test tends to contradict Warren’s story about family tension just a generation ago about ‘marrying someone part Indian’ and specific reference to Cherokee. Does not absolutely disprove it because who knows exactly what her mother or the other side of the family thought about what turns out to be distant small to very small portion Native ancestry. But this is politics, stories don’t have to be absolutely proved or disproved. Again without focusing on Trump and his antics but just looking at Warren I don’t know how this ‘vindication’ is anything of the sort for her.
I don’t agree as much about the distinction between what Harvard and Warren did listing her as ‘minority’ and if she had done it on her college application. Misrepresenting yourself is misrepresenting yourself and the DNA test makes it pretty clear in common sense terms that Warren and Harvard were misrepresenting her, given a test showing a lower boundary of Native ancestry below that of the average ‘European American’.
And in the relevant, political, terms (this was a presidential campaign launch video) I think the distinction between that and gaming race based college admissions is splitting hairs anyway. The recent “Hidden Tribes” study getting a lot comment now in media found 85% of Americans against considering race in college admissions. It’s not as if the broad electorate thinks the system itself is sacrosanct, as is at least indirectly implied by making it out much worse to game race based admissions than to game race based ‘faculty diversity’. The gaming reflects badly on the whole system, and Warren is a rock solid left type who firmly believes in that system, which few general election voters do. That’s not a good look for her general election-wise.
Re Warren. Her family was southern if memory serves. I remember the now departed poster Sampiro once wrote that many Southern families pre Civil rights made a claim of “Indian” ancestry to mask what was actually some black African ancestor. Maybe this was the case with Warren’s parents?
Yep, and not just southerners. And not just whites. There was a significant amount of “passing” by ex-slaves and their descendants in the 19th century, and if someone was not sure they could easily pass, a claim of Native American ancestry might be a better option than risk being outed as black.
In fact, when the race laws were written in the 19th century, exemptions were sometimes made for NA ancestry since so many white folks from the “older families” knew or suspected that they had NA ancestry somewhere.
Race in America has never been a simple black and white issue.
I have not seen the “full test”, but I don’t believe she did.
Still happens. Lots of people I know have “Indian” or “Cherokee” ancestry. I can’t disprove that (and it’s probably true in several cases) but I know of at least 2 cases where people did DNA tests to confirm family folklore about Native American ancestry and found they were actually descended from Black Americans. The cover story ended up the one believed by the descendants. The “one drop rule” doesn’t mean much anymore but there are still corners of the country where it can cause eyebrows to rise.
Of course, in several cases people are descended from Native Americans and blacks by the same ancestor - there being at least some level of intermarriage since before the US was even a country.
It’s a bad look, but every politician out there has something, or several things that give them a bad look. This is a reason why I think Democrats should drop the moral high ground tone and focus on what they will do for people. If you try to take the moral high ground, every transgression gets magnified.
He definitely opined on the weight of the kit as well (for some reason known only to him):
“We will very gently take that kit, and we will slowly toss it, hoping it doesn’t hit her and injure her arm, even though it only weighs probably 2 ounces.”
I feel that it should be noted (if no one already has) that the percentage doesn’t equate to “8 generations ago”.
Barack Obama, so far as society is concerned, is a black man despite having a white mom. If you were a Chinese girl, introducing a young Barack Obama to your parents as your fiance, they would consider you to be marrying a black man and that’s how it would go down in the family oral history.
Or, let’s say, a Native American tribe lives fairly near to a white settlement. Over the course of a century, there is a fairly good mix of white blood within the tribe. They’re all still 60-80% Native American, by genetics, and 100% culturally part of the tribe, but if you marry one of them then people looking at your children’s ethnic history, according to their DNA, would deduce that their Native heritage came from their grandparents, not their parent.
Genetic heritage is not quite the same thing as racial heritage. It could well be that Warren’s great grandma was a Native American. That doesn’t mean that she was 100% pureblood, as though summoned from the 1400s into modern day.
Not sure what you mean, but the report specified a “full blooded” or “non admixed” ancestor of Warren’s. Which means that her DNA says an ancestor somewhere between 6 and 10 generations ago was a Native American who did not have recent European (or other) ancestry.
Note that back pre-Loving vs. Virginia, so many prominent Virginia families claimed descent from Pocahontas that the state had to make an exception just for that in their anti-miscegenation law.
It is so weird that the “one-drop” rule-type people are basically the same ones who are dismissing Warren having native American ancestry being of any significance.
So, let’s say that that person’s child considers himself to be Native American, lives on a reservation, etc. but then marries a white woman. That child marries into the Warren family and - having a parent from the reservation - considers herself to be a Native American even though full-bloodedness is two generations back and there has in fact been no additional Native heritage added into the bloodstream since then.
People used to be racist. If you were 1/4th Native American then you were 100% Native American so far as they were concerned. Though, if you looked pretty white, they might take you into the family and fail to mention it to anyone outside the family.
We would probably expect the “whitening” to begin before the “Native American” person to have married into the Warren family, since the whiter you are the more likely you are to have white guys finding themselves attracted to you and more likely for those mens’ families to allow the marriage.
From being told that purebloodedness was 6-10 generations back, my expectation would be that the marriage into the Warren family would have been something more like 3-8 generations before Elizabeth. If she says that it was a great-grandma, and we assume that great-grandma was 1/4th Native American, then that would work out. If she says it was grandma, then that’s fairly unlikely.
But it’s become unclear who the ‘one drop rule people’ are in US society. In a way the Warren thing is just an extension in the trend of the ‘one drop rule people’ now being those on the identity politics left. As in Barack Obama being ‘black’ because he’s part black, often based on the second hand insistence ‘oh but typical racist white people would say so’, but it’s not them actually saying so. If it were, that would be ‘resisted’ ™.
But with Obama it’s six of one half a dozen: people of more or less evenly split heritage can call themselves whatever they want at the end of the day. Here in contrast it’s reached a mathematical point of silliness. Warren’s minimum of 1/1024 Native American per the test would be well below the average for American whites. And keeping in mind the average quoted is all whites in the US. It’s surely higher among whites from Oklahoma with WASP surnames, lower among urban ethnic whites in the North. So Warren has perhaps a little more to significantly less Native ancestry than the average white person from OK (give or take the use of Latin American not North American indigenous people’s DNA in the test for comparison). How is that significant? Except to point to how her previous statements and characterizations were very likely embellished, at best.
To further muddy the discussion, the DNA markers used by Bustamante were supplemented by South American Indian samples, due to an apparent paucity of North American Indian DNA samples. This, as I understand it, he justifies by pointing out that South American Indians were descended from the same prehistoric peoples that first populated North America via the Siberian land bridge.
So it is (again, as I understand it, and I welcome correction on the point), not ruled out that Senator Warren is 1/1024 Matsigenka (Peruvian) Indian.
That gets to be tricky because most Americans I know with ancestry dating back 3 or more generations, seem to have either some Native American or African blood in them from somewhere.
I think that’s partly why I can usually tell a caucasian American from a European because we tend to have slightly darker skin.
