My first book was about how the meaning of race in the U.S. was transformed in 2006-2008 by debates in the realm of electoral politics. The dominant narrative to emerge from the 2008 race was that the election of the first black president was a resounding triumph for the U.S. and a verdict on the essential goodness of the nation. Obama’s victory proved that the U.S. had overcome the worst of its racial history and was well on its way to becoming a “post-racial” nation.
Yet within a few years, as Tea Party members gave voice to an angry white nationalism, deportations of undocumented migrants reached an all-time high, and reports of the deaths of black Americans at the hands of the police seemed to scream daily from the headlines, earlier declarations that the U.S. had vanquished the problem of race seemed jarringly out of sync with reality. The presidential campaign of Obama’s immediate successor, Donald J. Trump, would again elevate to center stage debates about the presidency, race, and the future of the U.S., but in a wholly different way. A defining element of the current president’s political career is that he has sought, unceasingly, to harness and to amplify the winds of white racial resentment for political gain, linking white identity politics to the greatness and strength of the nation.
In this piece, I analyze the political conflict between President Trump and former democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren over her claims of indigenous ancestry. This controversy, I argue, provides a window into several different dimensions of the contemporary U.S. racial landscape, refracted through the lens of electoral politics. We see a clear example of racial politics in the time of Trump, in which the president confronts his political opposition with a strategic mobilization of whiteness. We also see, more broadly, the mobilization of two competing white racial projects—ones on both the right and the left of the political spectrum—as Trump and Warren seek to harness, bend, and manipulate the meaning of indigeneity in the pursuit of racialized political and personal ends.
The Controversy Itself
The issue of Elizabeth Warren’s ancestry first entered the electoral news cycle during her 2012 run for the senate. During the race, Warren’s republican opponent roundly criticized the Harvard Law professor for claiming to be part Cherokee and for implying, in certain contexts, that she was a “minority.” As Donald Trump came to political blows with Warren himself, he too zeroed in on her ancestry claims, repeatedly mocking Warren for stating that she was part Cherokee and referring to her variously as “Pocahontas,” “the fake Pocahontas,” and “the Indian.”
Warren’s response to Trump’s provocations was quite curious. In October 2018, as she prepared to roll out her 2020 presidential campaign, the senator released a video in which she travels back to Oklahoma in search of her Indian roots. In the video, Warren talks to relatives and former neighbors who recall having been told that her mother’s people were part Cherokee and that they had faced discrimination. Warren reveals that she has taken a DNA test and, in the closing of the video, an Ivy-League professor of genetics says to the delighted senator, “the facts suggest that you absolutely have a Native American ancestor in your pedigree.”
The release of the video and DNA test results by Warren’s team backfired profoundly. As Chris Cillizza wrote on CNN, “estimates of just how much Native American blood Warren actually possesses range from 1/64th to a whopping 1/1024th.” Trump used Warren’s move to mock her even further, stating, “I have more Indian blood than she has and I have none!”
Warren was also firmly rebuked by the Cherokee Nation. As Nation Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin Jr. stated, “Using 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.” Liberal pundits were also thoroughly dismayed by Warren’s ill-fated attempt to outmaneuver Trump, suggesting that the fact that she had so disastrously played into Trump’s hands did not augur well for her bid to replace him.
In response to Warren’s rebuke by the Cherokee Nation, Trump and his surrogates engaged in a kind of gleeful white supremacist pile on. In January 2019, for example, the President tweeted that if Warren had released a campaign ad “from Bighorn and Wounded Knee . . . . with her husband dressed in full Indian garb, it would have been a smash!” Furthermore, additional documents subsequently surfaced, making clear that at various times over the past two decades, Warren has clearly self-identified as “American Indian” or as “a minority”— rather than as white. In late 2019, in an attempt to bring the controversy to an end, Warren declared publicly that she was “not a person of color” nor was she “a citizen of a tribe.” She also apologized privately and publicly to indigenous leaders for “furthering confusion about tribal membership.”
While most commentators have argued that the native origins controversy was problematic for Warren because it exposed her to the criticism that she was an opportunist and a liar. I believe that this issue functioned as a kind of political kryptonite for Warren because of how powerfully it exploited white racial resentments on the right, while exposing the weaknesses, conflict, and anxiety about race that can haunt the political left.
Whiteness and Politics on the Left and Right;
Presently, I am writing a long-form analysis of this controversy with sociology PhD student Brieanna Watters. In that piece we attend closely to responses to this controversy on the part of American Indian scholars and activists. We also discuss native notions of tribal belonging (which generally cannot be determined via DNA) and explore how indigenous nations have sought to navigate the terrain of sovereignty and identity in their relations with the state. In the remainder of this article, however, I limit myself to a discussion of what the controversy over Warren’s ancestry in the context of electoral politics reveals to us about whiteness.
My first claim is that this controversy clearly illustrates several of the key themes that I am developing in much of my writing on race currently:
- For several decades now, sociologists have identified “racial colorblindness,” the notion that it is best to be “blind” to racial matters and to claim not to “see” race, as the dominant paradigm for understanding racial matters in the U.S. Yet I argue that the last decade or so offers clear evidence of an ideological shift among American whites away from the paradigm of colorblindness and towards deliberate consciousness(es) of race.
- Second, I argue that this new, more overt racial consciousness is bifurcated in two opposing directions: social justice-oriented anti-racism and resurgent exclusivist white nationalism. Thus, it is important to think about whiteness and white identities as differentiated by political identification (as well as by gender, sexualities, and social class).
- As a corollary to this, I argue, third, that it is possible to identify distinct and competing white racial projects Omi & Winant 1994) in the political sphere at this time, with different “uses of race” (Logan 2012) for each side.
- And fourth, I argue that the case at hand particularly demonstrates the importance of critically interrogating the dynamics of race and the construction of white identities among white liberals as well as among whites on the right.
On the Trump side, we see here the elaboration of a white identity that is belligerent and mocking. Trump’s clear contempt for the rules of “political correctness” (he referred to Warren as “Pocahontas” even at an event honoring Navajo veterans) is meant as a defense of a whiteness that understands itself to be threatened and under siege. In mocking Warren, Trump taunts both white liberals and the people of color with whom they seek to ally. The constant mentions of Trump’s “extraordinary divisiveness” in the press underscore a perception that Trump is engaged in a race war of whites against whites; he seeks not to unite all whites around race, but rather to unite conservatives around whiteness.
In calling Warren “Pocahontas,” while emphasizing that she is not, in fact, American Indian, Trump signals to his base that she, like other white liberals, is a “phony” and a race traitor. Warren and other liberals are also implicitly identified in this discourse as “reverse racists” who hate America, hate other white people, and cynically play the “race card” in order score “points” for their side.
As for what this tells us about white liberalism, there are a number of questions to ask. Why, for example, was Warren initially so vocal and insistent that she was part Cherokee? Why did she view this claim as politically useful? And what’s at stake more broadly when whites claim to be part American Indian (V. Deloria 1969; Sturm 2011; Poorman 2019)?
Indigenous ancestry claims among whites have a long history in the United States. Furthermore, as I argue in my research-in-progress, claims to indigeneity have been central to the assertation of U.S. national identity, white masculinity, and settler colonial ownership of the land. According to sociologist Evelyn Nakano Glenn (2015), whites in the colonial era were known to “appropriat[e] indigenous symbols, attributes and skills” as a means of establishing a cultural and national identity separate from that of Britain, and to declare implicit dominion over the land comprising the colony. In his 1998 book Playing Indian, Dakota scholar Philip J. Deloria points out that members of the Boston Tea Party dressed up as Mohawk warriors as they engaged in an act understood to be a foundational assertion of national independence. Further, historian Gregory Smithers (2015) writes that white southerners in the antebellum era often claimed indigenous roots as part of a defense of slavery and the southern way of life, in opposition to incursion from the federal government and the North. In the contemporary U.S., American Indian ancestry claims may serve to “stabilize” or “shore up” whiteness as an identity, as they facilitate a genetic/familial distancing from the history of white supremacy. For white liberals, who may understand whiteness as an “empty” or negative identity (Frankenberg 1993; Logan 2011), indigenous ancestry claims may allow for the appropriation of a more “authentic” racial self, or of a “less bad” kind of whiteness (Sturm 2011).
According to sociologist Jessie Daniels, writing in the Huffington Post, “there is a lot of overlap between believing you’re a ‘little bit Cherokee’ and white supremacy…. white families tell their children about a connection to a mythic Native American past as a way to lay claim to territory and to a sense of belonging. It is a way of asserting: we are the true First Peoples.”
Thus, this practice, embraced by the most liberal of liberal politicians, resonates with the heart of Trumpism. Whatever their intent, such claims engage in a form of indigenous erasure and replacement that is the driving instinct of settler colonialism (Wolfe 2006), and thus are contiguous with other assertions of white racial, national, and territorial dominance.
A last question to consider here is what larger social issues seemed to be at stake for the left. What was all the kerfuffle and handwringing over this issue in the liberal media about? I believe that one of the questions that was implicitly being asked was what are the dimensions of white solidarity and ally-ship with non-whites? How can liberal whites legitimately use race, and how should they not? And of course, what political tactics can be used against Trumpism and which should be avoided? Thus, I argue, the controversy over Elizabeth Warren’s claims of native ancestry reveals in part the discomfort and anxiety about race that often plagues the left and the still-fraught nature of the relationship between white liberals and the question of race in America.
This article was originally published in Footnotes Volume 48 Issue 5. Any opinions expressed in the article are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
