“Elizabeth Warren’s Native American Heritage” is the title of a new campaign video promoting the senior senator from Massachusetts. Ms. Warren, a former Harvard law professor, is claiming vindication after presenting the results of a genetic test which appears to show she likely has more of a claim to Native American heritage—but perhaps less of a claim—than the average white person in the United States.

The likely 2020 Democratic presidential candidate has been trying to find some way to respond to questions about her longtime claim of Native American heritage given that her family doesn’t belong to a tribe.

“Warren provided a sample of her DNA to a private lab in Georgia in August, according to one of the senator’s aides,” says a report today by Annie Linskey in the Boston Globe. But the senator sought a judgment on the results from Carlos Bustamante, a professor of biomedical data science at Stanford. Writes Ms. Linskey:

Warren didn’t use a commercial service, but Bustamante is on the scientific advisory board for Ancestry, which provides commercial DNA tests. He’s also consulted on a project for 23andMe, another major DNA testing company.

Warren said she was committed to releasing the report regardless of the results. However, Warren’s aides would not say whether she or any of her three siblings had previously done a commercial DNA test that would have provided them with some assurance about Bustamante’s analysis.

This column doesn’t find it odd that the senator didn’t want to rely on analysis performed by a commercial firm given her hostility to commerce generally. In any case here’s Professor Bustamante’s conclusion after studying the Warren test results:

While the vast majority of the individual’s ancestry is European, the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor in the individual’s pedigree, likely in the range of 6-10 generations ago.

This suggests that the senator is somewhere between 1/64th and 1/1024th Native American. A 2014 news account seems to provide useful context. “In recent years geneticists have been uncovering new evidence about our shared heritage, and last week a team of scientists published the biggest genetic profile of the United States to date, based on a study of 160,000 people,” reported Carl Zimmer in the New York Times. Mr. Zimmer added:

The researchers found that European-Americans had genomes that were on average 98.6 percent European, .19 percent African, and .18 Native American.

These broad estimates masked wide variation among individuals. Based on their sample, the resarchers estimated that over six million European-Americans have some African ancestry. As many as five million have genomes that are at least 1 percent Native American in origin.

At least according to the report from Professor Bustamante, it’s possible that Sen. Warren has far less than one percent Native American ancestry, and that her genetic makeup is perhaps similar to that of the average white person in the U.S. Could this create a problem for the senator both among those who have never claimed minority status and those who believe they clearly deserve it? Ms. Warren’s Senate re-election campaign is now rolling out testimonials from academic colleagues who say she never benefited from her identification as a Native American. The Boston Globe’s Ms. Linskey has previously reported on Ms. Warren’s various racial claims:

In 1984, she contributed five recipes to a Native American cookbook entitled “Pow Wow Chow: A Collection of Recipes From Families of the Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole.” In the book, which was edited by her cousin and unearthed during her 2012 campaign by the Boston Herald, her name is listed as “Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee.”

Warren also listed herself as a minority in a legal directory published by the Association of American Law Schools from 1986 to 1995. She’s never provided a clear answer on why she stopped self-identifying.

She was also listed as a Native American in federal forms filed by the law schools at Harvard University and University of Pennsylvania where she worked.

And in 1996, as Harvard Law School was being criticized for lacking diversity, a spokesman for the law school told the Harvard Crimson that Warren was Native American.

Given the Bustamante analysis, Ms. Warren might have chosen to acknowledge that her claims of minority status were a stretch. But she’s instead decided to present it as vindication, even demanding on Twitter that the President donate $1 million to something called the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center.

At a speech in July, Mr. Trump discussed the possibility of debating Sen. Warren in the 2020 campaign. Mr. Trump said that “in the middle of the debate, when she proclaims she’s of Indian heritage“ he would toss a DNA testing kit her way and say, “I will give you a million dollars, paid for by Trump, to your favorite charity if you take the test and it shows you’re an Indian.”

One could argue that the President didn’t actually make the offer but instead described a hypothetical scenario. Yet by demanding a Trump payment Sen. Warren clearly seems to be asserting that she is “an Indian.”

Before facing President Trump in a 2020 debate, Sen. Warren will first need to win over the Democrats who vote in presidential primaries. If these voters accept her as a Native American then logically it suggests that most if not all Americans can also claim to be members of groups that have historically suffered discrimination. We’re all minorities now?

This column thinks it would be wonderful if politicians decided to stop separating Americans by race but doubts Ms. Warren can sell this to Democratic party activists.

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Verdict on Ice

“Champagne Remark May Cost Lawyer $289 Million Bayer Award,” Bloomberg, Oct. 12

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Bottom Story of the Day

Questions Nobody Is Asking

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Mr. Freeman is the co-author of “Borrowed Time,” now available from HarperBusiness.