Earlier this week, Elizabeth earned plaudits from her most devoted fans — denizens of elite coastal newsrooms — for apologizing to Native Americans at a forum she attended. The Massachusetts Senator acknowledged that she’d made “mistakes” and caused “harm,” but failed to detail what, specifically, those harmful mistakes actually were. Her campaign also memory-holed her disastrous DNA stunt video, which had been hailed by some in the press as brilliant when it was first released, only to slide into the “problematic” column when (once again) genuine Native Americans strongly objected to the nature of her supposed “proof.” Out: This dodgy evidence shows I was (1/64th to 1/1,024th) right all along! In: I’m really sorry for unspecified errors. And so, for the umpteenth time, Warren is trying to put this nagging controversy behind her. She can’t do so, however, until she persuasively and compellingly addresses two fundamental questions.

(1) Is she a Native American — as in still, to this day? Her response to this has been to deflect, instead answering different but related questions. She asserts that she is not a member of a tribe, an about-face from her longtime claims of being a Cherokee, and that she is not a woman of color. She was bludgeoned into the first reversal under harsh criticism from real Cherokees. The second point is more perplexing. Are Native Americans…not people of color? A Native American candidate forum attendee seemed understandably and suitably confused during an appearance on MSNBC:

(2) Why did she stop listing herself as a Native American just after securing tenure at Harvard Law School? Warren claims that she did not gain any financial or professional benefit from formally classifying herself as a racial minority in the 1980’s and 1990’s, but powerful circumstantial evidence and common sense suggest that’s not true. Documents chronicle how she flipped from categorizing herself as a white person to a Native American just months before she was hired into the Ivy League for the first time, during a period in which elite institutions were under heavy fire for non-diverse faculties. She proceeded to continue to check the ‘Native American’ box in a key professional directory, widely known to be consulted by hiring deans, for roughly a decade — abruptly ceasing this self-classification upon being granted a tenured position at Harvard, the peak of her trajectory. I suppose Warren could concoct any number of reasons why she began listing herself as a Native American when she did. It’s a lot harder to explain the highly suspicious timing of her reversion back to being a white person. To my knowledge, she’s only attempted to justify this incriminating timeline once, and it was embarrassingly weak:

Warren’s explanation to the Boston Herald was that she listed herself as a minority in the hopes that she would be invited to a luncheon so she could meet “people who are like I am” and she stopped checking the box when that didn’t happen. Perhaps it “didn’t happen” because at no point, at any of the schools she attended or worked at, is there any evidence that Warren ever joined any Native American organizations on campus or in any way interacted with anyone in the Native American community.

(Read more from “Two Simple Questions Elizabeth Warren Cannot, or Will Not, Answer About Her ‘Native American’ Fiasco” HERE)

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