User:TheLeftIsIrrational/Sandbox

False claims of Cherokee heritage


Warren repeatedly claimed to have Cherokee and Delaware descent on the basis of family lore. During her career at Harvard, the university often boasted of its diverse faculty including mentioning Warren among its list of minority professors with other people of color. Prior to her career at Harvard, Warren provided information that suggested she was a minority for the Association of American Law Schools directory of professors of law. This claim spilled over into her run for the United States Senate in 2012. Warren's high cheekbones, along with the same feature present on her Full House-white grandfather, was proffered as evidence by Warren herself, demonstrating the embarrassing ignorance of a high profile politician basing her knowledge off of stereotypes rather than actual facts. Despite what alt-right human biodiversity web forums would have you believe, high cheekbones aren't all that special.

Naturally, this provided ample political cannon-fodder to the GOP. During the 2016 campaign season, when he was running for president, Trump frequently slammed Warren as a high-profile Clinton donor. He called her "Pocahontas" – an ethnic slur that particularly showcased his ignorance, since Pocahontas wasn't Cherokee. Due to a fear that Warren may emerge as the new face of the Democratic Party, Trump upped the ante against Warren. Just in case anyone got the wrong idea about his motives behind the stereotype, in his CPAC speech he doubled down, saying he "should have saved the Pocahontas thing" for a time when he'd be running against her.

On October 15, 2018, Warren released a DNA test done by Carlos D. Bustamante, a professor of Biomedical Data Science and Genetics at Stanford University. According to Bustamante, the test results "strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor in the individual's pedigree, likely in the range of 6-10 generations ago", so that Warren is at least 1/1024th to 1/64th Native American. But the test does not confirm that this heritage is specifically Cherokee because Native American tribes do not provide genetic information, forcing geneticists to use South American natives as a proxy, and cannot determine the degree of admixture in other ancestors should they exist because of the stochastic nature of genetic inheritance and limitations of genetic tests. The test itself identified 95% of Warren's ancestry as European, leaving the possibility that Warren has as much 5% Native ancestry.

The Cherokee Nation condemned Warren, stating "A DNA test is useless to determine tribal citizenship. Current DNA tests do not even distinguish whether a person’s ancestors were indigenous to North or South America." Cherokee Nation Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin Jr. stated "using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong."

Warren apologized for the incident.