Thread by @theoc2ps

The white supremacy of Elizabeth Warren

This is not my work but of Twila Barnes & @ColeDeLaune1

It's an important article; unfortunately, technical issues make people click on footnotes markers as if they were links, and reduce the credibility of the piece.

Trying to capture.

Warren is white, both phenotypically and culturally. There is absolutely no genealogical evidence that she has ancestors from North American Indian nations.
pollysgranddaughter.com/p/elizabeth-wa…

Chris Child touted a marriage certificate in 2012 but was debunked – the doc. doesn’t exist & New England Historic & Genealogical Society made clear it “has not expressed a position on whether Warren has Native ancestry nor do we possess any primary sources to prove that she is.”

The results of the genetic testing she infamously released last October relied on comparisons to markers derived from Native populations in Latin America rather than the continental United States.
washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-hou…

And such testing remains a dubious enterprise at best – just several months before Warren, a dog in Canada tested positive for Indigenous DNA.
vice.com/en_us/article/…

Warren didnt just innocently share “family lore.” She identified herself as Native in federally mandated diversity statistics for at least 6 years while a professor at Harvard Law School despite lacking the “tribal affiliation” outlined in those documents.
bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/05/…

Contemporaneously, Harvard repeatedly touted Warren as an example of ethnic diversity among Law School faculty to academic press outlets. University of Pennsylvania – at which Warren taught prior – likewise cited her in a “Minority Equity Report.”
bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/05/…

And Warren admitted that she had listed herself for a full decade as a “minority” in Association of American Law School Directories from 1986 until 1995, the year she secured tenure at Harvard.
bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/04/…

Warren never engaged with Indigenous cohorts on the campuses in question.
bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/05/…

Although implicit purpose of diversity initiatives is to ensure representation of perspectives informed by variety of cultures, executive director of Harvard’s Native American Program could not recall Warren ever participating in any of its undertakings.
bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/05/…

Warren can’t keep her prevarications straight about how & why she identified as Native. In 2012 Senate primary, she professed to be wholly unaware that Harvard had been promoting her as a minority (“I think I read it on the front page of the Herald”)
bostonherald.com/2019/02/01/cha…

Then, she insisted that she had never formally declared herself a minority (“there was no, there is no reporting for this. It came up in lunch conversations once with faculty, after the fact.”)
bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/05/…

She maintained that she had never claimed distinction as a minority to any employers until after she was hired, those Association of American Law School directories – frequently used by law schools during the 1980s for recruiting – apparently notwithstanding.

After emergence 1986 TX State Bar application on which she wrote her race as Native, Warren offers a starkly different characterization of how pervasively she appropriated identity “All I know is, during this time period this is consistent with what I did”
washingtonpost.com/politics/after…

Warren has trucked in reductive stereotypes about physical features to justify her ethnic posturing. When Indigenous lineage and tribal links are out of the picture, “high cheekbones” are all you’ve got.
washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/…

Extensive scope of Warren’s deceit & blithe ignorance abt heritage in which she costumes herself arent most disquieting reflections of her disdain for Native Am. Her years-long evasion of & attacks against Native voices who've expressed concerns abt her background & behavior are.

In 2012, with fellow Cherokee women united by desire to educate & invest tribal perspectives into contemporary discourse I traveled to MA to seek an audience w/Warren’s team. Campaign stonewalled Indian Country Today, the largest Indigenous news platform.
newsmaven.io/indiancountryt…

Continued:

https://twitter.com/theoc2ps/status/1193550711327473666

Warren Senate Campaign ignored Cherokee protestors at the state nominating event.

https://twitter.com/theoc2ps/status/1193550711327473666

Warren Senate Campaign rebuffed overtures from Indigenous delegates at the Democratic National Convention.
newsmaven.io/indiancountryt…

In summary: when confronted with Indigenous perspectives that posed an obstacle to her personal advancement, Warren’s carefully calculated response was to pretend that we didn’t exist.
eu.usatoday.com/story/onpoliti…

Warren remained largely quiet on the cares and galvanizing causes of Native peoples. She even called for the arrest of Greg Grey Cloud, a Crow Creek Sioux activist protesting the Keystone XL pipeline from the Senate gallery.
newsmaven.io/indiancountryt…

Eventually, the DNA debacle of Warren's own making forced Warren to deliver a qualified mea culpa. But she has never acknowledged – much less apologized for – her active hostility toward Indigenous critics who tried to reach out to her & then strived to hold her to account.

Warren's unequivocally failed in most foundational moral duties of her position: to listen engage & represent. For years, she intentionally did what colonialism has always done to people of Indigenous origin: she has erased us from our own story.

Because of their Twitter commentary on the subject, Ryan Grim, DC bureau chief of The Intercept, accused Cherokees of “doing Trump’s work” and “enabling his abject racism.”

https://twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1094446376962928641

Reporter Thor Benson of The Rolling Stone and The Daily Beast sneered at the “virtue signaling” of critiques about Warren by a Dine/Inhanktowan Dakota author.

https://twitter.com/thor_benson/status/1094441047621390337

In an article denounced by the Native American Journalists Association, The Huffington Post’s Jennifer Bendery minimized the chorus of Native qualms on the matter (even from the Cherokee Nation Secretary of State) as “crickets.”
huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/elizabet…

Bill Maher lectured his television viewers, “If you think this stupid, blown-out-of-proportion Indian controversy makes her inauthentic, you’re the phony.”
foxnews.com/entertainment/…

What a perfect illustration of the evolution of white supremacy: first, Euro entitlement to Native territories; then, white entitlement to Native identity sans the cultural contexts that confer meaning on said identity; and, now, inevitability, ...

...the ascendancy of white presumption to literally dictate how Natives should think and feel. This is the malignant legacy of Elizabeth Warren – bringing out the chauvinistic worst in the ostensible best and normalizing scorn for perspectives of color.

Warren's predicated her career on a 2nd false identity: tht of a warrior for the disenfranchised. Her animosity toward one of the most systematically oppressed demographics in nation’s history emphatically underscores that she's not only ethnic impostor but also ideological fraud

Black & Latinx voters in pivotal primary states should ask themselves how they can trust Warren, a politician who spent years determinedly avoiding the minority community to which she contends she belongs.

And Warren's competitors for the Democratic nod must roundly denounce the insidious racism of her actions and her cavalier marginalization of Indigenous points of view that challenge her pursuit of power.

“This is the fight of our lives” ~Warren launching her 2020 run. Inconveniently for her, Indigenous Am have been fighting for their lives for generations.

We’ve survived invasions & epidemics, endured occupations, outlasted efforts to annihilate & acculturate us out of existence

We’re still here.

And we’re not going to be silent.

Twila Barnes, Cherokee, is a genealogist with over 10 years' experience and is registered with the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She is also a writer, most widely known for her Cherokee history and genealogy site "Polly's Granddaughter." Follow her on Twitter as
@pollysgdaughter

Cole DeLaune, Kiowa, is a freelance writer, editor, and author. He is a member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma. Follow her on Twitter at
@ColeDeLaune1

@ColeDeLaune1 Unroll:
threadreaderapp.com/thread/1193545…