Elizabeth Warren should not have shared the DNA test

The ruinous plan began Monday morning, when she posted a video explaining that we were going to see her receive the results of her DNA test. We see her receiving a phone call from the geneticist: "You absolutely have a Native American ancestor," she tells him, and she smiles – the most natural and human moment of this drama. It's a smile of relief, a smile that tells him that his parents had not provided him with fiction. "So everything was true," Nick Carraway decides after Gatsby shows him the Montenegro medal and the Oxford photo. The desire to believe in a dream is a powerful thing.

But nothing gold can remain and in the middle of the morning, people began to look more closely at the result of the exculpatory DNA and noticed that the geneticist had concluded that the ancestor or ancestors in question had lived six to ten generations previously, which means that in the part of Warren's genome that was sequenced, between 1.6% and 0.1% of the DNA suggests Native American origins.

The reduction in percent identity of one genome reminded me of another American who was committed to putting his DNA results in the line of sight as proof of his place in culture: Richard Spencer. He had expected a report of "white," "white," "white," but this resulted in something that remained the subject of anxious jokes – the kind that would require the combined talents of William Faulkner and Sigmund Freud to interpret – among Spencer and his fellow travelers. Its DNA is only 99.5% of European origin. The other half (0.5%) includes African heritage and, at 0.1%, "East Asian and American" heritage, according to the 23andMe report, which uses a methodology that is not directly comparable to Warren's test.

When you follow an impulse that places you in league with Richard Spencer, you went astray and the birds ate all the breadcrumbs that could have brought you home. Only disaster can follow. Thank goodness, the Secretary of State of the Cherokee Nation made a statement about the test: Warren was guilty of "harming tribal interests with his ongoing claims of tribal inheritance" and "a DNA test is useless for determine tribal citizenship ".

The United States of America looks like the Cherokee Nation: DNA testing is not relevant to our conception of citizenship. The poison that was trying to infiltrate our groundwater in recent years would tell us something different: this breed is everything, the only thing. Genetic testing is filled with irrefutable and often terrible truths – how many people have learned from any of these reports that the man who raised them is not their father? It's their rightful place: the private sphere of individual life. Allowing Donald Trump to inspire you, like Spencer, or to make you so discouraged, like Warren, trying to justify yourself by making them public is something we should resist every turn.