DNA Testing Can’t Tell Us Who We Really Are. It Can Tell the Cops.

Do we know anything new about Elizabeth Warren, now that we’ve seen her DNA test results? Besides, I mean, that she seems to have questionable judgment about when and when not to take the president’s bait. Before we learned that Elizabeth Warren most likely had a native ancestor somewhere between six and ten generations ago, we knew that she did not belong to a tribal nation, and that her connection to Native American identity was based largely on family lore. We now know that lore has some evidentiary basis.

But the criticism of Warren’s claims around her identity has never been about the purity of her bloodline, but about the facts of her experience as a person in the world. As Nick Martin writes on Splinter, Warren “is not Native because she is not, and has never been, a Native American to anyone else, especially not Native peoples.” Has the discovery of a Native predecessor changed that? If not, do we really know anything new about Elizabeth Warren?

If Warren placed a misguided faith in the power...