NATIVE SIN
Democrats are giving Elizabeth Warren a pass on her great big Cherokee insult
ELIZABETH Warren is a career hustler who has tried on many personas: lawyer, writer of dopey self-help books (“The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan”), Lou Dobbs-style economic populist, consumer activist — and, infamously, she spent part of her academic career pretending to be a Cherokee, making the milky Oklahoman quite possibly the palest person ever to be passed off to Harvard Law as a “woman of color.”
In an era of sensibilities so exquisitely refined that a clumsily deployed pronoun will have progressives pointing and shrieking like Donald Sutherland at the end of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Warren gets a pass on the intellectual equivalent of wearing blackface — for decades. Why?
For one thing, she’s a rich white woman in a party run by rich white women. That can’t hurt.
Progressives are not especially eager to engage in an uncomfortable discussion about the intersection between identity politics and privilege vis-à-vis rich white liberals like Warren or progressive darling Robert Francis O’Rourke, the Anglo scion of a powerful Texas political family who affects a Hispanic nickname that resonates helpfully in El Paso. Progressives will forgive a great deal if you have the right politics: Bill Clinton was the Harvey Weinstein of US presidents, but Democrats protected him.
Warren’s stitched-up identity is a little raggedy around the edges — the Cherokee fakery, the false story about losing a teaching job to sexist discrimination against pregnant women — but she isn’t the only one in the Democratic field with loose threads that might be tugged at. If Warren isn’t getting called out on her identity-fudging, it may be because there isn’t anybody in the Democratic field comfortable pointing the finger.
The affirmative-action programs that were designed to benefit the oppressed descendants of American slaves have disproportionately benefited relatively well-off people. The greatest beneficiaries — by far — have been college-educated women such as Warren. The Democratic Party presents itself as the champion of the poor, the black and the brown, but institutionally it is dominated by rich white women such as Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein. Its policies and priorities reflect that.
You might think that an actual woman of color in the Democratic presidential race would say something about Warren’s shenanigans. But these identity questions get complicated. The people of color who are most prominent among contemporary Democrats are figures such as Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan economist and a white hippie from Wichita, and Kamala Harris, the daughter of an Indian cancer researcher and a Jamaican economics professor at Stanford. Harris leans pretty heavily on identity politics — “Kamala Harris is campaigning like she knows Black History Month is coming up,” Aaron Ross Coleman wrote in The Nation — but her life and her story are in many ways disconnected from those of the African Americans for whom she offers up herself as a tribune. She may not be entirely comfortable poking Warren on “authenticity,” whatever that word might actually mean in the context of something as comprehensively phony as a Democratic presidential primary.
The left wants to like Warren. She’s a respectable version of Bernie Sanders — no less vicious, but presentable — and Democrats seem to believe that she has a good chance of beating Donald Trump. Trump loves teasing Warren about her Cherokee nonsense, and no Democrat wants to echo President Trump — even when he’s right. So they’ll pretend not to notice as Warren quietly deletes an old tweet about the DNA test that she once offered as evidence of her Cherokee ancestry, as she just has.
Sanders doesn’t have the heart to go after Warren’s fabrications. Harris apparently won’t do it. Poco O’Rourke isn’t up to the task. Native Americans are an important constituency, but apparently there is no one in the Democratic Party willing to take a stand on the insult that Elizabeth Warren has offered them.