Scott Brown Wants Elizabeth Warren to Take a (Pointless) DNA Test

Sheer ignorance and bigotry are a toxic mix
Politics • Views: 53,921

Former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown was defeated by Elizabeth Warren in the 2012 election, and is still clearly carrying a rather large grudge against her. And since Republicans like Brown know she’s a powerful and effective voice for the Democrats, they’re doing what they always do: trying to destroy her personally.

I’m so old I remember when people tried to paint Brown as a “sane, moderate Republican,” but here he is jumping aboard the Donald Trump Bigotry Train and echoing his “Pocahontas” rhetoric against Warren.

And he’s adding a wrinkle of his own: demanding that Warren take a DNA test to “prove” her Native American ancestry.

“As you know, she’s not Native American,” Brown, an early Trump endorser, told reporters on a conference call organized by the Republican National Committee. “She’s not 1/32 Cherokee.”

[…]

“Harvard can release the records, she can authorize the release of those records, or she can take a DNA test,” he said, insisting that Warren took a job that might have rightly gone to a nonwhite applicant. “It’s a reverse form of racism, quite frankly.”

Did he really invoke the hoary old right wing “reverse racism” meme?

Brown’s call for a DNA test isn’t just bigoted and stupid — it’s ignorant and wrong. Because according to the National Congress of American Indians’ Genetics Resource Center, DNA testing cannot be used to “prove” an individual has Native American ancestry.

One type of DNA testing called DNA fingerprinting can be used to help document close biological relationships, such as those between parents and children, as well as among other close family members. Other kinds of testing for genetic ancestry use markers to see how similar an individual is to a broader population or group, based on probabilities drawn from databases of research on populations and group genetic characteristics. However, no DNA testing can “prove” an individual is American Indian and/or Alaska Native, or has ancestry from a specific tribe. Genetic testing can provide evidence for the biological relationship between two individuals (e.g., paternity testing), but there are no unique genes for individual tribes or American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) ancestry in general.

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Last updated: 2023-04-04 11:11 am PDT
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