The Perils of the Trump-Warren Feud Over Ancestry
Throughout America’s race-bound history, blood has always been a pernicious stand-in for authenticity. Terms like white, Negro, Indian, mulatto, quadroon, Creole, and even Melungeon have served as much more than messy colloquial or self-descriptive identities; they’ve been used by those in power to assign people to castes. It is only in this context that one-drop rules and percentages of racial ancestry have become markers of anything, a context in which dusty old race science still animates policy and great-great-great-grandparents can still be incurable taints or gatekeepers.
Regrettably enough for everyone, the politics of the moment are affected by that legacy, too. On Monday, Senator Elizabeth Warren released a DNA test result that, “provides ‘strong
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