How White Is Elizabeth Warren?
16th October 2018
The Other McCain asks the obvious question.
Notice the word “suggests.” At most, Warren has less than 1.6% Native American ancestry and, as for “family lore,” this test indicating the possibility of a very distant non-white ancestor — she’s so white, she would have qualified for membership in the Bund Deutscher Mädel — absolutely does not confirm the tales Warren has told. She claims that her parents eloped because of anti-Indian prejudice in Oklahoma: “My daddy’s parents, the Herrings, were bitterly opposed to their marrying because my mother’s family, the Reeds, was part native American.” Whether or not her paternal grandparents were “bitterly opposed” to her father marrying her mother, it could not have been because the Reeds were “part native American,” as a 1/32nd non-white ancestry (i.e., 96.9% white) would not be apparent and, contrary to her telling, the remote ancestor she claimed was Cherokee was identified as white in census records. If the Senator is asserting that her father’s parents were extraordinarily ignorant, we’ll take her word for it, but this tells us nothing about the alleged ancestry of her mother’s side of the family.