Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who President Trump calls “Pocahontas” because of her fake claims that she is Native American, got slapped around on a radio show on Friday morning.
Warren (D-MA), a 2020 candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, appeared on the New York City-based radio show “The Breakfast Club. The senator, who is polling in the single digits currently, once again sought to dismiss why she claimed for years to be an American Indian.
“I grew up in Oklahoma. I learned about my family the same way most people learned about their family, from my mamma and my daddy and my aunts and my uncles, and it’s what I believe. But I’m not a person of color, I’m not a citizen of a tribe, and I shouldn’t have done it,” Warren said.
Co-host Charlamagne Tha God pressed her. “How long did you hold onto that, because there were some reports that said you were Native American on your Texas bar license and that said you were Native American on some documents when you were a professor at Harvard,” he said. “Why’d you do that?”
“It’s what I believed; like I said, it’s what I learned from my family,” Warren said.
“When did you find out you weren’t?” the host asked.
“Well, I’m not a person of color. I’m not a citizen of a tribe, and tribal citizenship is an important distinction and not something I am,” Warren dodged.
“Were there any benefits to that?”
“No,” Warren said.
“You’re kind of like the original Rachel Dolezal, a little bit,” Charlamagne said with a smile. “Rachel Dolezal was a white woman pretending to be black.”
“Well, this is what I learned from my family,” Warren said.
Watch the interview below:
“You’re kind of like the original Rachel Dolezal… she was white pretending to be black.”
REKT pic.twitter.com/OlP02fR6Qt
— Jessica O’Donnell 🏈 (@heckyessica) May 31, 2019
Last year, as Warren mulled the 2020 race, she decided to get a DNA test to prove her longtime claim. It did not go well. The test results showed she may have had an American Indian ancestor — six to 10 generations ago. That means she’s anywhere from 1/64 to 1/1,024 American Indian. To put those terms into percentages, that means she’s between 1.562 percent and .0924 percent. So that means she’s anywhere from 98.437 percent to 99.9 percent white.
Meanwhile, there’s Dolezal, the former civil rights activist made infamous for claiming to be black while actually being of white European ancestry, with no known black or African ancestry. Dolezal explained that all away by simply saying that she “identifies” as black. And that just what Warren did for years: Identified herself as an American Indian.
As for Warren’s claim that she got no benefit from claiming to be a minority, there are many questions.
Warren listed herself as Native in the Association of American Law School Directory, and according to The Boston Globe, she “had her ethnicity changed from white to Native American at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she taught from 1987 to 1995, and at Harvard University Law School, where she was a tenured faculty member starting in 1995.”
Some critics say she got the Harvard slot by claiming to be American Indian. “Harvard Law School in the 1990s touted Warren, then a professor in Cambridge, as being Native American,’” CNN reported last November. “They singled her out, Warren later acknowledged, because she had listed herself as a minority in an Association of American Law Schools directory.”
A 1997 Fordham Law Review article identified the Democrat as Harvard Law’s “first woman of color.” Warren even submitted recipes to an American Indian cookbook called “Pow Wow Chow,” which was released in 1984 by the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, Oklahoma. She signed her entries “Elizabeth Warren — Cherokee.”
