Warren Baffles Everyone with Jaw-Dropping New Announcement About Her Race
Sen. Elizabeth Warren has started an exploratory committee to run for president, which pretty much means she’s running for president.
(In fact, as The Hill pointed out, the law makes no distinction between such a committee and an official candidacy, but that’s for another day.)
So, the senior senator from Massachusetts is off exploring the beautiful state of Iowa, home to the Iowa Caucuses, a pivotal contest in the nomination season.
“This is how it starts. Person to person. Town to town. Across Iowa and then across America,” Warren told an audience Friday in Council Bluffs, according to The New York Times.
Well, we’ll see about that. This kind of “person to person” stuff works well in Iowa, where the caucus process makes glad-handing across every farming town a necessity. By the time Warren gets to the South Carolina primary, it’ll be attack ads and carefully planned rallies.
However, one of the great things about the person-to-person deal in Iowa is that it often yields some fun questions. Like, for instance, when someone in Sioux City decided to ask Warren about her infamous DNA test.
“I’m glad you asked that question. I genuinely am,” she said, according to The Hill.
“I’m not a person of color. I’m not a citizen of a tribe,” she said. “Tribal citizenship is very different from ancestry. Tribes and only tribes determine tribal citizenship and I respect that difference.”
Warren: “I’m not a person of color. I’m not a citizen of a tribe. Tribal citizenship is very different from ancestry. Tribes and only tribes determine tribal citizenship and I respect that difference.”
— Mike Memoli (@mikememoli) January 5, 2019
I always love when someone insists they are “genuinely” glad about something.
It’s like when someone prefaces a statement with “to be honest” — you can be sure what you’re about to hear will not be 100 percent honest. Likewise, it doesn’t exactly sound like Warren was glad to hear the question.
And there was a reason: Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test results say everything about Elizabeth Warren as a person.
It’s a bit difficult for me to summon any level of caring regarding what race Sen. Warren is. What most people care about is the fact that, for years, she’s nursed the narrative that she’s some sort of person of color — a Native American to some degree.
Whenever asked for evidence, however, she would say that it was was a family story and she was doing it to honor her relatives or something to that effect.
Then there was the test which we all keep referring to and the video in which it was revealed Warren was Native American … or kind of possibly 1/1024th Native American, but still enough that Donald Trump was wrong — at least to hear Warren tell it.
I can’t remember any reveal that had a more negative reaction since Lebron James’ infamous “I’m going to take my talents to South Beach.” Warren has been patching up her relationship with her party, but surely the results still stand, right?
Well, apparently not. Or, as she says, “Tribal citizenship is very different from ancestry. Tribes and only tribes determine tribal citizenship and I respect that difference.” So she’s a person of color in her ancestry but not in terms of what tribes say about her — which shouldn’t make a difference in terms of whether or not she’s a person of color, which she said she was.
But she’s not anymore. Got that?
After years of narrative-weaving, this is where we are.
If Elizabeth Warren had just said “my bad” back in 2012, none of this would have mattered. For six years, we got all sorts of insistences that we were dealing with a legitimate person of color, and now she admits she’s white, except for that caveat about her ancestry.
This is what you can expect from Warren over the next few years.
The only good part about this sort of jaw-dropping inconsistency is that she’ll have to answer questions about her ancestry a lot — and let’s hope plenty of the questions take place in these “person to person” exchanges she wants to have, if just to squeeze every bit of awkwardness out of these wonderful moments.
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