Whether it's 23andMe or Ancestry.com, the proliferation of genetic testing kits is posing a real problem for the race-obsessed.
Last summer, Salon.com published an amusing article titled “Let’s enjoy the white supremacist freakout after DNA tests show they aren’t 100 percent white.”
“Many users on the white nationalist website Stormfront posted their results from genetic ancestry company 23andMe, and were unpleasantly surprised to discover that they weren't as white as they thought,” the author, Michael Glassman, wrote.
DNA doesn't lie—which is why so many white supremacists are itching to write off companies like 23andMe as a left-wing conspiracy to promote diversity.
But the liberal editors at Salon might not be so amused when DNA tests start posing a problem for a different demographic: white liberals posing as oppressed minorities. Apparently, one liberal who really needs a cheek swab is Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren—or as President Trump prefers to call her, “Pocahontas.”
Trump made the crack at an event honoring actual Native Americans, the Navajo Code Talkers. Warren and the mainstream media feigned outrage. They informed us that “Pocahontas” is now an unspeakable racial slur, one that Trump used to insult a Native American woman.
“I really just couldn't believe it,” Warren told CNN's Anderson Cooper.
Can we challenge Warren to take a DNA test? Because I “just can't believe” that she deserved affirmative action at Harvard.
Although Warren claims she never benefited professionally from claiming to be Cherokee, journalists who dug into her background found evidence to the contrary. “The controversy surrounding her heritage began when the Boston Herald reported that Warren, then a law professor at Harvard, had listed herself as a minority in the Association of American Law Schools directory from 1986 to 1995,” Paste Magazine reported. “Harvard, it seems, specifically used her claim to bolster their diversity credentials at a time when they were being criticized for a lack of minority faculty.”
Elizabeth Warren has never produced a shred of DNA or genealogical evidence for her claims—and neither have various genealogists and historians. Instead, she relied on family folklore about a long-lost Cherokee ancestor to gain advantages that could have gone to an actual Native American woman.
What moral authority does Elizabeth Warren have to speak for Native Americans, let alone get offended on their behalf?
I speak from personal experience. I ordered my first ancestry test kit from a company called DNA Tribes way back in 2006. Despite growing up believing my mother was Irish and my father was half Polish and half German, my results revealed there was more to the story. My ancestry includes people of all colors. As Warren claims, I also descend from “native people”...of Australia. Presumably, one of my Irish ancestors ran into some trouble and landed in a prison colony in the Outback. Today, some of my closest living genetic relatives in the world are mixed-race Aborigines from Western Australia. In the land down under, these dark-skinned native people are considered “black.”
Does that make me black, too? When the Australian prime minister formally apologized to Aborigines for centuries of injustice—including the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their homes—was he apologizing to me?
Shockingly, DNA Tribes and 23andMe revealed I am, at most, only 3 percent German. It appears instead that my dad's ancestors were Spanish Jews who lived in Southern Spain for a long time, intermarrying with Catholics there, as well as Spanish Arabs. Some of my closest genetic relatives today are—surprise, surprise!--Muslim Middle Easterners, as well as self-described Latinos living in Arizona.
Was I entitled to speak for the Latino community when Arizona passed its so-called “papers, please” law in 2010? As a person of Arab descent, do I have the moral authority to comment on the Syrian refugee crisis?
The answer to all these questions is a decisive “no, of course not.” Why? Because I'm not a left-wing intellectual elitist posing as a victim of discrimination, that's why.
I am not Elizabeth Warren. I've already had the advantage of being white in America; I don't need to steal from actual minorities by trying to get affirmative action at the same time. I didn't claim to be Hispanic, Arab, or black on my college applications. Warren, on the other hand, checked the “Native American” box when she sought a job at Harvard. Like Ward Churchill, the fire-breathing leftist professor (and fake Cherokee) who called victims of 9/11 “Little Eichmanns,” she did it to gain moral authority on the left, as well as benefits intended for actual victims of discrimination.
Shouldn't we be more offended by Warren's racial scamming than by the newly designated “racial slur,” Pocahontas?
Join the conversation as a VIP Member