"I'm not enrolled in a tribe, and only tribes determine tribal citizenship. I understand and respect that distinction."

What distinction?

That's Elizabeth Warren in this 5-and-a-half minute video dealing with the white-hot issue of the DNA test that does or doesn't support her statements over the years about her purported Native American ancestry.


I can figure out what distinction she means, but I'm interested in what bad writing reveals: "I'm not enrolled in a tribe, and only tribes determine tribal citizenship. I understand and respect that distinction." No distinction has been articulated. She's just conceded that she's not "Native American" in the sense that matters to the Cherokee Nation, which spoke up about her DNA test yesterday. To them, to be Cherokee is to have political status because the tribe has governmental power and controls its membership. The distinction Warren fails to articulate is between citizenship and genetic ancestry. Why doesn't she make that explicit? Does she think that touting one's genetics sounds wrong (at least to some people)? Does she not want to be confrontational to the Cherokee tribe by saying, yes, I know that tribal citizenship is important to you, and I'm not enrolled and don't qualify to be enrolled by your standards, but I've still got something going for me that I think matters, even though it's not what you think matters?

Why does it matter?! It matters because she talked about it in the past, and whether we believe all the law professors who say in that video that they did not take her supposed minority status into account when they hired her, we do know that she identified herself as Native American to the American Association of Law Schools and that Harvard Law School represented itself as having a Native American professor in its faculty when all it had was her. So the tiny percentage of possibly Native American DNA that Warren has matters only because she's fighting a charge of dishonesty and unfairness. If she had not used a claim of Native American ancestry in the past, she would never point to a DNA test now and say, look, I'm possibly a little tiny minuscule bit Native American. If that was the normal discourse in America, we'd be so bored with it by now.

I got that video at The Washington Post, where it appears with a Dana Milbank column:

Like most in the American melting pot, I’m a mutt: a stew of English and German, western pioneers and sharecroppers, immigrants from the shtetl and a great-great-great-grandfather who died fighting for the Iowa 39th Infantry in the Civil War.

This is why Warren’s DNA stunt was such a blunder: She took Trump’s DNA-test dare and let him divide us — again — by race and ethnicity....

Milbank relies on the same argument Warren uses in her video: Trump is the one using race to divide us. The defense of Trump there is: Trump calls out the dishonest use of race. But Milbank says something I think progressive Democrats like Warren disapprove of, the notion that America is a "melting pot." I think that's regarded as a microaggression.

From the Wikipedia article "Melting Pot":

In the early 20th century... [t]he melting pot was equated with either the acculturation or the total assimilation of European immigrants, and the debate centered on the differences between these two ways of approaching immigration: "Was the idea to melt down the immigrants and then pour the resulting, formless liquid into the preexisting cultural and social molds modeled on Anglo-Protestants like Henry Ford and Woodrow Wilson, or was the idea instead that everyone, Mayflower descendants and Sicilians, Ashkenazi and Slovaks, would act chemically upon each other so that all would be changed, and a new compound would emerge?"

We were talking about the idea of the "melting pot" back in June 2016. I wrote:

[Scott] Adams tries to figure out what Trump could say to undo the "crazy racist" branding. He pictures Trump saying he loves everyone and believes in the "melting pot."

I think what Trump is going to try to do... is argue that the true meaning of "racist" is what Democrats do, which is to openly talk about everyone — and to frame political appeals — in racial terms. What Trump said yesterday — about Elizabeth Warren — was "She made up her heritage which I think is racist. I think she's a racist actually, because what she did was very racist." The idea is: It's racist to exploit race, and they do that all the time. Democrats can be relied on to cite race continually, and Trump will have a lot of "there you go again" opportunities: They're trying to divide us by race to get political power for themselves. I will never do that.

ALSO: Trump might be able to get people to identify with him. He could say: I've been called a racist so unfairly, and it's what they do to you too if you don't stay in line. They've got people so afraid of being called a racist — completely unfairly — that half of the members of my own party are afraid to support me, they're so afraid they might get called a racist. This fear — this race-based fear, because of their racist name-calling — is terrible for America.