Americans call it “Cherokee Syndrome”, and the number of those taking advantage of this phenomenon has grown rapidly in the age of identity politics. The “criteria’’ for membership — and that is putting it generously — is both straightforward and flexible.
Do you have high cheekbones? Long dark straight hair? Or are you a blue-eyed blonde who equates your whiteness with mundanity and harbours a romantic notion that the blood of some long dead Indian brave courses through your veins? Say goodbye to mediocrity and hello to minority! You too can join the 819,000 Americans who identify as members of this community, irrespective of the fact the combined number of the three federally-recognised Cherokee tribes is less than 400,000.
I am of course talking about United States senator Elizabeth Warren, who is touted as a possible Democrat nominee for the presidential election in 2020. Having long been accused, most notably by President Donald Trump, of exploiting her suspect claim of Cherokee and Delaware heritage, Warren last week released the results of her DNA test.
If she thought this would vindicate her, Warren has badly miscalculated. She has long claimed she was 1/32nd (fifth generation) Native American, yet results show at best this is only 1/64th (sixth generation). At its most tenuous the link is 1/1024th (tenth generation). To quantify the latter in decimal terms, she has as little as 0.09765625 per cent indigenous blood. Given European Americans possess on average 0.18 per cent Native American ancestry this, in terms of ethnicity, would put her in the same category as Snow White. That amounts to one huge arrow through Warren’s ego and a public relations disaster for the Democrats given the impending midterm elections.
Warren has claimed her purported ancestry “had no role whatsoever” in her being appointed as a Harvard law professor in 1995. However, her explanation as to why she changed her ethnic identity from white to Native American in the late 1980s and early 1990s is unconvincing. The New York Times reported this month her claim that she did so “to honour her heritage because many of her older relatives were dying in that period”. The Cherokee Nation was unimpressed, releasing a statement that it was “inappropriate” for her to claim a connection.
Pocahontas, as Trump labels her, has a habit of telling porkies. In 1984 Warren contributed to the recipe book Pow Wow Chow edited by her cousin Candy Rowsey. Two of those recipes she put her name to, “Crab with Tomato Mayonnaise Dressing’’ and “Cold omelettes with Crab Meat’’ are almost identical to those compiled by a French chef which appeared in the New York Times in 1979. A third, “Herbed Tomatoes’’, appears to have been lifted from a 1959 Better Homes and Gardens magazine, even down to the description “Great accompaniment to plain meat and potatoes meal!”. In the unlikely event Warren contributes to an updated version of the book, she at least deserves to claim the “Baloney Sandwich’’ and the “Heap Big Humble Pie’’ recipes as her own.
Such is the parasitic world of identity politics. Its defining trait is inherited victimhood, and it attracts the opportunistic, the conceited and those who crave both attention and sympathy. Although it grates us no end, we habitually acquiesce in the self-indulgence of erstwhile whites who, having discovered a far-removed ancestral connection, stick feathers in their hair or pose in possum skin outfits while they sanctimoniously speak of their “people”.
Unfortunately the healthy inclination to ridicule these cherrypicking poseurs is usually defeated by the knowledge that doing so will at the very least invite furious public condemnation or worse, result in being hauled before the Australian Human Rights Commission and potentially the Federal Court to answer accusations of so-called hate speech. On that note, just consider that Warren’s case would unlikely have been exposed had America’s citizens, as is the case in Australia, not enjoyed an express constitutional right to free speech.
As ludicrous as Warren’s actions are, she can at least claim a DNA link to her demographic whim, no matter how tenuous. If there is such a link for Canadian Rachel McKinnon, who in Los Angeles this month became the first transwoman to win the Union Cycliste Internationale Masters Track World Championship, then I must be blind. McKinnon literally stood head and shoulders on a level dais above the silver and bronze medallists, Carolien van Herrikhuyzen and Jen Wagner-Assali respectively, who were both born female, or according to that politically correct nomenclature, are ‘cisgender’.
I was the 3rd place rider. It’s definitely NOT fair.
— jen wagner-assali (@jkwagnermd) October 15, 2018
Assali, not unreasonably, later objected to competing against an opponent who was born male. “It’s definitely NOT fair,” she tweeted the day after the event. Not surprisingly this resulted in an intense online backlash, which only serves to prove that when it comes to hate speech, the vehemence of the reaction is proportionate to the degree of truth in the original remark.
Foremost in the criticism was McKinnon herself, despite Assali’s subsequent apology. Her tweets provide a revealing insight into the militant mentality of entitlement and oppression. The expression “born a man”, she asserts, “helps contribute to harmful myths and false stereotypes”.
No one is "Born a man." We are all born babies. The language of "born a man" helps contribute to harmful myths and false stereotypes.
— Dr. Rachel McKinnon (@rachelvmckinnon) October 20, 2018
To criticise her for entering a women’s event, she maintains, is analogous to the historical claim by some whites that black athletes have an unfair advantage. And lastly for good measure, her being a woman is proved by possessing a birth certificate that says so, she adds. Much like Caligula’s horse was a consul due to the Roman emperor’s decreeing so, you might say.
"Why do you race with women?"
— Dr. Rachel McKinnon (@rachelvmckinnon) October 20, 2018
1. I am a woman.
2. Every single piece of identification I have, including birth certificate, says 'F' on it.
3. We are required, by the rules of sport, to compete with the gender on our identification.
4. I am a woman.
That's why.
Her tweets are also indicative of a not just a creeping, but a creepy, intolerance. A lesbian who refuses “to date or f*** trans women is transphobic,” wrote McKinnon in August, “just like not wanting to date a black person is racist”. Have you ever heard a more self-centred or ridiculous analogy? We are approaching the stage where the discrimination police threaten to compromise sexual autonomy itself.
Laugh if you will at the idiocy of controversies such as these, but the consequences of automatically catering for the demands of these interest groups are serious. Only last month The Guardian revealed British transwoman Karen White, an inmate of a women’s prison, had allegedly sexually assaulted four female inmates last year. Notwithstanding she had been originally remanded on multiple charges of sexually assaulting women, she had been allowed to transfer from a men’s prison.
This has prompted calls to stop the practice of placing men in women’s prisons when they have not legally changed their gender. “In my view,” said Frances Crook, the chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, “any man who has committed a serious sexual or violent offence against women, who then wants to transfer but has not gone through the whole process, still has a penis and still has male hormones, should not be put into a women’s prison.” A British survey this year revealed that 60 of the 125 transgender prisoners — nearly half — had been convicted of sexual assault (I am not suggesting this reflects the level of offending by trans women in general).
Whether people can legitimately “choose” their ethnicity or gender is not the debate we should be having. They can identify as a poached egg for all I care. What we should vigorously oppose is the militant dictum that it is morally wrong for another to question, scrutinise, and even reject these choices, especially in cases where the decisions adversely affect or disadvantage others, or when the subjects concerned seek to gain a public benefit or privilege through their new-found status. Their right to choose must be respected, but not necessarily their choice. To do otherwise is to yield to the lunacy of subjectivity supremacy, and it is right we call out charlatans who speak with forked tongues.
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