I found this article especially interesting, having listened to Democracy Now
this morning. What was mentioned on the program, and not in this article, is
that the university where she taught, (was it Harvard?), claimed her as, "a
woman of color", because she'd checked Native American on some form or other,
and this meant that they met a government requirement for diversity. That is a
bit far fetched, and it shows the insanity of this whole thing. Well maybe, it
shows the insanity of a certain kind of identity politics. There are people in
the Black Congressional Congress who, although they are black, are not
representing the interests of black people. Susan Collins certainly was not
representing the interests of women when she voted for Bret Kavenaugh. But this
DNA thing is on a whole other level. It's a commercial enterprise. People send
money to on-line companies to have their DNA tested. My younger daughter
mentioned, recently, that she'd done so. You pay money and receive this
meaningless information about what your ancestry is supposed to have been. But
Elizabeth Warren got manipulated into a stupid fight with Donald Trump. It was
a stupid move.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2018 1:29 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Elizabeth Warren's DNA Debacle Bodes Ill for All
of Us
My plan is to take my DNA to the Crematory. I don't need to prove where I came
from. I do know that I am one half Clyde Jarvis and one half Elsie Ludwig.
And I do know that I am the result of an unbroken chain of successful Begetting
stretching back to Adam and Eve...if such people existed. An unbroken chain!
Does it matter to me whether any of those begetters were from one tribe or
another? The important thing is that the chain was unbroken. And for that, I
need not have my DNA tested.
Carl Jarvis
On 10/18/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Elizabeth Warren's DNA Debacle Bodes Ill for All of Us
Sen. Elizabeth Warren at a town hall in Woburn, Mass. (Charles Krupa
/ AP)
It should probably concern me-I am a Jew, after all-that our society
has replaced calipers with cotton swabs. Still, I've got to admit that
the whole idea of using perhaps the most remarkable scientific
accomplishment in the history of human inquiry-the sequencing of the
human genome-to parse individual human pedigrees like some demented,
science-fiction Homo sapiens kennel club is just farcical enough to
keep me from putting my papers in order and gathering enough cash to
flee on the next steamer to Shanghai.
It reminds me of a viral, meme-ified Spider-Man panel in which he
confronts the villainous Sauron, a brilliant human geneticist turned
evil mutant pterodactyl (really!). "You can rewrite DNA on the fly,
and you're using it to turn people into dinosaurs?" exclaims the
heroic web-slinger. "But with tech like that, you could cure cancer!"
"But I don't want to cure cancer," the villain replies. "I want to
turn people into dinosaurs."
Those are the shoals on which our contemporary, 23andMe-style personal
genomics founder and sink: a uniquely American style of the old Soviet
Lysenkoism, in which behavioral and cultural traits somehow pass,
sperm to egg, across generations in percentages of inheritance. In
2016, vocal "Never Trump" conservative Ana Navarro famously tweeted:
"ZERO% African-Americans support Trump in polls, I knew I had to be
black. Took @ancestry test. So excited. 4% black! Explains a lot." She
tagged it with the hashtag "Sistah."
I don't want to be uncharitable, and it's obvious that this
regrettable tweet was meant to be at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek,
but it points to the ludicrous nature of the entire enterprise. Four
percent black! What can this possibly mean? Will we return to the
racial classifications that gave colonial European slave societies an
entire taxonomy? "Honey, our results came back and someone in our
family is a hexadecaroon!" Its offensiveness is mitigated by its
absurdity, but only slightly.
Which brings us to the present politico-genetic kerfuffle, in which Sen.
Elizabeth Warren has responded to Donald Trump's racist "Pocahontas"
nickname for her by having a respected geneticist prove that somewhere
in her family, "6-10 generations" back, someone was a Native American.
I understand the impulse. Warren's family, like half of the white
people in North America, had some half-baked frontier fable-part
"Leatherstocking Tales," part "Dances With Wolves"-about intermarriage
with some or other native nation-in the Warrens' case, the Cherokee.
She accepted it unquestioningly. Well, I never saw the passenger
manifest that brought my great-grandfather over from Calabria, but I
assume my grandmother is telling me the truth.
This bit of legend-"family lore," we're now mysteriously calling it,
one of those weird anachronisms that become neologisms in our stupid
political media-unadvisedly found its way into Warren's biography when
she was still just a professor; it became an issue during her first
Senate campaign, and Trump made it an issue again when he decided to
start calling her "Pocohontas," a figure whose actual, disputed
history is enthralling and terrible.
The nickname is appalling. Trump's rage-aholic base of
exploding-capillary golf cheats loves it precisely because it gives so
much offense. Most people, the sort who are only vaguely aware of
politics and find Trump an embarrassing but frankly distant figure, barely
know who Warren is at all.
These Trumpland taunts seem immensely acute to the folks who marinate
in Twitter or cable news all day, but even to many habitual voters
and semi-regular consumers of the news, they appear as the
decontextualized flotsam churned up by a storm of gestural shorthand,
a system of symbols almost entirely alien to the language of daily concern.
Warren, whose political instincts I've often found shockingly OK for a
Democrat, stumbled headlong into this one. It was a fight she could
not win and ought to have brushed away as more crazy talk from a
racist, elderly man. Trump is our protean national id and cannot be
trapped by inconsistencies or past utterances. His imaginary halcyon
past and made-great-again future exist in a best-president present
unmoored from logic, reason or causality. Warren got a DNA test in
order to confront Trump, who'd said he would give a million bucks to
charity if she got a DNA test proving her ancestry. So what did he do?
He stared directly into a camera and claimed he never made such a
promise. He then went online to laugh at the idea that the test showed
she was "1/1024 [Native American], far less than the average American."
The Cherokee Nation and other Native American groups also decried the
test, having long dismissed genetic descent as a determining factor in
their cultural heritage. Chuck Hoskin Jr., the Cherokee Nation
secretary of state, said in a statement that "[u]sing a DNA test to
lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal
nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong. It makes a mockery
out of DNA tests and its legitimate uses while also dishonoring
legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are
well documented and whose heritage is proven. Senator Warren is
undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal
heritage."
In fairness, Warren had already made a careful, rather legalistic
disclaimer to a similar effect in her announcements, noting that
distant genetic lineage is not tribal membership, which is up to
tribal nations themselves to decide. But she, unlike Trump, is
beholden to some form of basic logic, and the obvious rejoinder is:
Well, if you believe that, then why did you take the test at all?
You've proven that you are something that you admittedly cannot be.
Which demonstrates precisely what Trump's been bellowing all
along-that you are a phony and a fraud!
Beyond these specific circumstances lies the idea-both terrifying and
intensely silly-that we have now entered an era when public figures
present their genes as tokens of authenticity, like Aldous Huxley by
way of the Marx brothers. It's incredibly gross. It reifies an
absolutely false notion of authentic heritage and gives automatic
credence to the neo-eugenicists who argue for immutable, heritable,
racialized cultural characteristics and, ultimately, immutable racial
hierarchies. It is a form of bullshit biological determinism.
Kellyanne Conway, the omnipresent Trump spokeswoman, waved her hand
and called it junk science, and for once, she wasn't wrong.
This will all have a far more negligible effect on either the midterms
or the subsequent presidential election than the people paid to squawk
about politics would have you believe, or do believe themselves, if it
has any effect at all. But I can't help but feel a twinge of dire
anticipation for where this ghoulish obsession with race and pedigree
could lead. Blud und Ehre-"Blood and Honor"-was the popular Nazi
slogan. What is ours now-blood and error?
Jacob Bacharach
Jacob Bacharach is the author of the novels "The Doorposts of Your
