Krystal Tsosie: Elizabeth Warren’s DNA is not her identity

Imagine what it would be like to be the subject of one of Trump’s bullying campaigns, to have the most powerful man in the world ridicule you day after day, in his crude, below-the-belt way. What would you do about it? Ignore it, and you look weak. Handle it in some principled way, and he will only increase the pressure. Respond to it in kind, hurling equally harsh insults at him, and your energies will be turned back upon you.

Warren has already dealt with one of the potent ramifications of Trump’s taunts: his assertion of the old calumny that she used her claim to American Indian ancestry to gain the advantages of affirmative action from various educational institutions and employers. To combat this, she has created a section on her website that displays the PDFs of 10 personnel records, each with a red box drawn around the part of the form where she entered her race: “White”; “White”; “White.”

Here we must pause to give grudging admiration to the wicked effectiveness of Trump’s methods. His bullying seems so crude and impulsive when it’s belching through the news cycle. But what other Republican politician could force a progressive senator with presidential ambitions to produce a fat dossier attesting to her own whiteness? Is she leading the resistance or trying to join the Savannah Junior League, circa 1952? The PDFs are intended, of course, as an ironclad rebuke to Trump’s claims about affirmative action, but given the way the left interprets race, might they just as easily be regarded as a testament to her own successful claim on white privilege? Becky goes to Harvard.

None of this decreased the pressure from Trump, who continued his campaign of contempt and belittlement. We can understand Warren’s immense personal desire to clear her name, to rescue the idea of herself that she has held since her earliest years. And we can fully appreciate the political problems that would have ensued if she had never dispelled the idea that she was a faker; she may not have checked the American Indian box on job and school applications, but she had indicated her minority status in a variety of other advantageous ways.

Read: The first DNA test as political stunt

And at some point she decided that the thing to do was to have a DNA test and make the results public, which has only proved that Trump can push sensible people past the point of madness. Putting one’s genetic information into the public conversation about one’s fitness for office is a bizarre idea. Moreover, her insistence that it would offer definitive proof of something her supporters believe in was tone-deaf. Doesn’t Warren realize that race is a social construct and whiteness is an idea? Doesn’t she know that the science of genetics is often used as a tool of the oppressor, that you cannot destroy the master’s house with the master’s tools?