Elizabeth Warren’s goose is cooked No morsel of truth in her Indian identity!

Boston Herald ^



If I might make one suggestion before the updated version of the “Pow Wow Chow” cookbook is released: Next time, Liz, hold the mayo.

Even if you were 1/1000th Native American — which you’re not — and even if Cherokees did hold pow wows — which Cherokee genealogist Twila Barnes told the Herald yesterday they don’t — even then, your contribution to authentic teepee cuisine is “Crab With Tomato Mayonnaise Dressing?”

Why didn’t you throw in Tuna Casserole and Some Twinkies while you’re at it?

Like her recipe (“serve salad with remaining mayo on the side”), everything about Liz Warren screams “I’m white!”

In fact, I doubt you know anyone who is more “white” than Professor Pow Wow Chow. Her blond hair, her blue eyes, her pale, freckled skin, her wealth, her white-collar job at a “white-kid” Ivy League college, her liberal-suburbs-white-lady politics — Liz Warren is a walking, talking tribute to “Guilty, Affluent White People Who Listen To NPR” American culture.
Which is why it’s so offensively shocking to read report after report about Warren as a “woman of color.” That’s the exact phrase used 15 years ago in an in-depth article from the Fordham University Law Review about minority women in academia: “Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995.”
And she’s got the cookbook to prove it!
Nobody cares that Liz Warren is not really 1/32nd or 1/64th Native American. What’s off-putting is that Warren is so clearly not a minority member in any meaningful sense of the word.
When this article and others were published describing Warren this way, she should have objected. She should have corrected the record on behalf of those Americans who have truly suffered because of their race. But instead she spent her career, as she put it, “checking the box.”
Here’s the reaction to Warren’s self-serving box-checking from “Polly’s Granddaughter,” a Cherokee Indian and genealogist in an open letter to Harvard Law’s “first woman of color”:
“You say you only ‘checked the box’ in an attempt to meet others like you, but that doesn’t make sense. If one is claiming to be Cherokee and wants to meet other Cherokees, they don’t ‘check a box’ on a job application or in a directory for their profession! They go to where Cherokees are.”
“You are from Oklahoma!” (emphasis in original)
Polly’s Granddaughter is absolutely right. As I’ve written previously, my mom was born in Oklahoma, and her great-grandmother, Nancy Hill, was a Cherokee from the Oklahoma territories. I also attended college in Tulsa, Okla. Meeting Indians in Oklahoma is as easy as knocking on a neighbor’s door and saying “Hi, wanna come over for some crab-and-mayonnaise salad?”
Being from Oklahoma also means there’s a good chance Warren also encountered anti-Indian prejudice first-hand. I only lived there a few years, and I did. I ran into some Okies who spoke about Native Americans the way the worst Southern whites talked about black Americans.
Those are the Native Americans the phrase “person of color” is intended for, not “Former member of ABBA” look-alike Liz Warren.
She knows this. She’s known it her whole life. Yet she’s chosen to play the role of suffering minority member, thereby making a mockery of the real suffering of others