Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat Senator who famously claimed to have Native American ancestry despite those claims being suspicious, was compared to Rachel Dolezal by a radio host on Friday, Yahoo News reports.
On Friday, Warren appeared on The Breakfast Club radio show, where she was interviewed by radio personality Charlamagne Tha God (real name: Lenard Larry McKelvey). She was asked by the host to explain why she once claimed to have had Native American ancestry, even though that claim is widely regarded as suspicious.
As previously reported by The Inquisitr , a scandal of sorts erupted around Warren in 2012, when the Boston Herald revealed that Warren had claimed to have Native American ancestry on her employment paperwork for both the University of Pennsylvania and then Harvard. Whether or not her claims of Native American ancestry helped her in her career remain uncertain.
What is certain, however, is that those claims have garnered her unwanted attention. Donald Trump, for example, has repeatedly called her “Pocahontas.” Making matters worse, Warren later took a commercial ancestry DNA test that revealed that she did have a Native American ancestor, but it was likely six to ten generations ago.
Warren, for her part, tried to explain herself to Charlamagne Tha God. “I grew up in Oklahoma. I learned about my family the same way most people learn about their family, from my momma and my daddy and my aunts and my uncles, and it’s what I believed. But I’m not a person of color. I’m not a citizen of a tribe, and I shouldn’t have done it,” she said.
Charlamagne wasn’t impressed: he called Warren “kind of like the original Rachel Dolezal.”
Oh wow. Discussing Elizabeth Warren’s past identification as Native American, @cthagod tells Warren, “You kind of sound like the original Rachel Dolezal” pic.twitter.com/NV5ybzJLVE
— Rebecca Buck (@RebeccaBuck) May 31, 2019
“You’re kind of like the original Rachel Dolezal, a little bit. Rachel Dolezal was a white woman pretending to be black,” he said.
Rachel Dolezal, for those not familiar, is a white woman who claimed to black and the victim of hate crimes. She was “outed” by her parents in 2015 as being white and having no African ancestry; further, police found no evidence that she had been victimized criminally. To this day, she continues to claim that she “identifies” as black.
I have ALWAYS wanted big hair. ALWAYS wanted massive gravity-defying curls. Today I got to try on @liveandletlee wig and I just ended up looking like Rachel Dolezal. I am DEVASTATED ??? pic.twitter.com/LQfz3ipkLY
— Inge Wulff (@Inge_Wulff) May 23, 2019
Warren didn’t seem to be particularly fazed by the statement, instead insisting that she was only claiming Native American ancestry because “this is what I learned from my family.”
Though Warren has apologized, both at large and to the Cherokee Nation specifically, for suspiciously claiming Native American ancestry, Yahoo News writer David Knowles posits that those claims will continue to haunt her should she get her party’s nomination for president.
