Warren representing herself as Native American is quite a stretch

The DNA test that “vindicates” Elizabeth Warren doesn’t come close to justifying the way she used her claim of Native American identity throughout her legal career.

The most generous interpretation of the test shows that one of Warren’s great-great-great-great-grandparents was a Native American. That would make her mother a possibly 1/32nd Native American (and Warren 1/64th, or perhaps 1/1024th) yet somehow that was, according to her account, enough to cause her father’s family to ostracize her parents for engaging in what they considered a mixed marriage.

Even if we accept this, it still bears asking why Warren was willing to represent herself as a Native American when applying for a professorship at Harvard University.

Warren argues that her declarations did not help her career. That it was pure love of her “culture” that made her change her identity in legal directory listings and even contributing to a cookbook with a cringe-inducing title “Pow Wow Chow,” that listed her as a Cherokee.

Does being a 1/64th at best Cherokee really justify the claim that she was the first Native American or “woman of color”— as the school declared — on the Harvard Law faculty? If so, that’s a form of affirmative action that is so vague that renders the entire apparatus of race-based hiring or admissions unfeasible if not irrational.

More to the point, imagine for a moment that Warren was a conservative Republican rather than a liberal Democrat. Would anyone whose ties to Native American ancestry were so tenuous avoid being accused of the grievous, politically incorrect sin of cultural appropriation if they weren’t liberal? Don’t bet on it.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org.