Elizabeth Warren and Racial Politics

Elizabeth Warren, 2020 Presidential Candidate, Massachusetts Senator and progressive firebrand du jour, entered a packed conference room at the Hanover Inn about an hour late. In her absence, a group of fresh-faced volunteers distributed campaign signs and other paraphernalia while inoffensive vintage pop music played on the speakers, barely audible over the sound of conversation. Warren took the stage and launched into her usual stump speech which, as a native of Massachusetts, I have grown quite familiar with. For her part, Warren is an energetic and passionate speaker, with a set of well-worn talking points guaranteed to elicit an enthusiastic response. While I admired her enthusiasm and her ability to captivate her audience, I found her views so disagreeable that I was unable to have nearly as good of a time as her supporters were.

A sentiment expressed by a member of the audience near the end of the event perhaps captured my dislike of Warren on both a personal and political level. A woman in her late sixties, who is frequently involved in the Black Lives Matter protests which occasionally happen on the green according to one rally attendee, asked a question about racial issues. As a means of prefacing her question, the woman said that Warren was the “best person to talk about race.” Given Warren’s record on race, which one could describe as questionable at best, such an assertion is patently ridiculous. The fact that no one else in the crowd of several hundred seemed to take issue with this deluded claim is troubling, particularly given the Democrats’ professed position as the more racially clued-in of our two major parties.

Senator Warren’s claim to Native American ancestry has been proven extremely tenuous at best, but I will not question that, at a certain point in her life, she may have genuinely believed herself to genuinely be of Native American descent. Oklahoma, where she was born and raised, is full of people who claim negligible Indian ancestry, in addition to those who belong to the State’s several federally recognized tribal nations and can actually prove their heritage beyond family legend. Her claim that she always believed she was Native because her family had “high cheekbones,” while reductive and witless, is not by any means outlandishly offensive, and is in fact an inverse of sorts to President Trump’s claim that the Mashantucket Pequot, whose Foxwoods casino threatened his Atlantic City gaming empire, “don’t look like Indians to me.” For the record, the Mashantucket oversee one of the largest tribal corporations in the eastern United States and are, in fact, Indian. Even the first documented instances of Warren claiming Native heritage, when she applied to the Texas bar and when she claimed to be Indian in a survey of Harvard Law School faculty, are not automatically disqualifying in her pursuit of higher office, even if in hindsight they qualify as tremendously stupid. However, Warren decided to accentuate her past missteps by publicizing her DNA test, which stated that she had a Native American ancestor anywhere from six to ten generations ago. A generation is around thirty years; Warren’s claim is the equivalent of a modern-day American claiming to be British by tracing their ancestry back to the Revolutionary War. Rather than apologizing for her past actions and seeking to launch her campaign by focusing on issues like income inequality that she is most passionate about, she chose to publicize her own failings. And unlike the President’s “Pocahontas” jibe, which has been undeniably effective at riling up public vitriol against her, Warren’s own attempt at “owning” the opposition has backfired spectacularly.

Warren’s decision to release the results of her DNA test to prove that she was of partial Indian descent is one of the least well-thought-out ways of launching a presidential campaign in the history of American politics. The awful rollout of her campaign has apparently made many Democratic donors wary, given that she has raised a mere $6 million in the first quarter of 2019, three times less than Bernie Sanders’s haul, and around $1 million less than rising star Pete Buttigieg, who didn’t even formally launch his campaign until earlier this month. Even failed Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke, who launched his campaign months after Warren did, raised $9.4 million in the same quarter. Of course, the Democratic donor base has likely not stopped supporting Warren because of her senselessness; they have simply moved on to newer, younger candidates capable of checking more demographic boxes (Buttigieg and Kamala Harris, among others) and familiar faces with demonstrative appeal in Trump country (Biden and Bernie). But, more than being an ill-conceived attempt at getting back at a President who, while mercurial and only semi-competent in most other regards, is undeniably effective at playing the role of attack dog, Warren’s DNA test fiasco demonstrates a carelessness and naiveté unbecoming of a public figure approaching her seventieth birthday. For starters, Warren has never sought to advocate for Native people at any stage of her life, save for a recent attempt to make up for her past indifference towards issues affecting tribal communities by sponsoring legislation overturning a court decision declaring the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe ineligible to take land into trust. While this seeming disinterest regarding tribal issues could be due to an ideological dislike of identity-based political and student groups( let’s not forget she was a relatively conservative Republican until the late ‘90s), it seems more likely that she claimed Indian heritage out of a desire to stand out among the Harvard Law faculty. For the record, I’m not totally ruling out the possibility that Harvard pressured her to claim Indian ancestry in order to boost the statistical “diversity” of its faculty, something which was coming into fashion during the birth of the bleeding-heart era. Warren’s latter-day overtures to Native peoples smack of tokenism and desperation, rather than genuine atonement.

In a speech to the National Congress of American Indians, the largest tribal lobbying group in the United States, Warren addressed her past claims of Indian heritage directly, and said all the right things in order to appeal to the Native vote. She promised to address health-care disparities in Indian communities, the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and improve tribal economies. Warren’s rhetoric, along with the overtures made by many Democrats towards Native Americans in recent years, smacks of the same sorts of promises made by the Party in their pursuit of maintaining a tight grip over the African American and Latino vote. Like clockwork, the Democrats emerge from their coastal and suburban communities every election season and try to appeal to Black, Hispanic, and now Native communities, stocking their campaign platforms with empty promises to minority communities. Then, once the dust has settled and the votes have been counted, nothing changes. Since the Nixon administration, still the best presidential administration in history as far as Indian policy is concerned, Native people have been largely ignored by each subsequent administration, save for the occasional photo-op or small-potatoes initiatives that do little to address the infrastructural and economic issues which relegate Indian tribes, like many rural communities, to extreme poverty. Although most Democratic politicians can’t claim much success in terms of actually helping to improve the lives of people of color, Warren’s seeming attempt to paint herself as a standard-bearer for racial progress is particularly laughable given her own racial stupidity in the past. Based on the Black Lives Matter woman’s question, such an attempt seems to be working, at least in the minds of the most susceptible members of our Upper Valley community. Warren will likely not win the Democratic nomination in such a competitive field, but the fact that she is running and is seen as an authority on anything to do with race or racial issues is laughable. Warren’s perceived position as an expert on race, despite her poor track record on the subject, shows that she has been able to win an audience on an emotional level regardless of what the facts actually are.