Oh, the tangled web we weave…! During a conspicuously uncomfortable and hard-hitting interview on the syndicated radio show “The Breakfast Club,” presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren was grilled on why she identified as “Native American” on her Texas bar registration card and at Harvard.
It’s a question Warren hasn’t had to field in a while and one to which her answer, depending on when it was asked, would have ranged from self-righteous indignation to contrition over having misrepresented herself. At the height of her “identity” problem in October 2018, LU’s Ben Bowles quipped that maybe the solution for Warren was to claim that she “self-identifies” as an American Indian.
That is sort of where Breakfast Club host Lenard Larry McKelvey’s head was when he exclaimed to Warren, “You’re kind of like the original Rachel Dolezal a little bit — Rachel Dolezal is the white woman pretending to be black.”
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The fun begins in the video below starting at about the 21:40 mark.
Warren responded this time by feebly explaining that she believed the family stories that were passed down from her parents and extended family. She added that the Boston Globe found that she didn’t benefit from her previous claims in school or when it came to her professional life.“Nothing about my family ever affected any job I ever got,” the senator said.
That’s not entirely true. According to The Globe, back in 1984, Warren and members her family contributed recipes to a Native American cookbook, where she signed her name “Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee.” Two years later Warren listed herself as a “minority” in the American Association of Law Schools’ directory of faculty, which is commonly used by recruiters. In the early 1990s, she was hired by Harvard as a law professor, and the university actually touted Warren’s phony ancestry.
Before she finally submitted to taking a DNA test that proved that she had less American Indian blood than the average American, Warren’s proof of her native heritage was …well, that she has high cheekbones.
I still have a picture on my mantel at home, and it’s a picture my mother had before that, a picture of my grandfather. And my Aunt Bea has walked by that picture at least 1,000 times, remarked that he … had high cheekbones like all of the Indians do, because that’s how she saw it. And she said, ‘And your mother got those same great cheekbones, and I didn’t.’
High cheekbones aside, Warren never had an adequate explanation for her very un-Cherokee-like blond hair and blue eyes.
Cross posted with modifications at The Lid
