BEB- I can't make any kind of argument as to why Manroe B is being feted as a woman. But I can explain why Liz Warren

claimed a fraction of Native American heritage and got completely slammed for it.

What Warren did was more complicated and extensive, and IMO much worse, than the way you've framed it.

In the 1980s and 90s, Warren claimed to be Native American on several key official forms such as law and bar directories. This allowed institutions she was affiliated with - University of Pennsylvania and Harvard - to count her as an ethnic minority and to use her as evidence of the schools' commitment to racial diversity.

(She also claimed to be Cherokee specifically in a "Native American" cookbook she contributed to in the 1980s. I put the "Native American" in quotes there coz he recipes in the book, including Warren's, seemed more reminiscent of WASPY country club cuisine in New England in the 1950s-60s than to Native Americans who originally inhabited the SE USA and were later relocated to reservations in Oklahoma and North Carolina.)

Warren's dubious claims were extensively covered, and disputed, when she first ran for the Senate back in 2012 as these sources from then show:

https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/05/article-cites-elizabeth-warren-as-first-woman-of-color-hired-by-harvard-law-school

https://web.archive.org/web/20140428203447/http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/04/29/elizabeth-warren-was-listed-minority-professor-law-directories-and/yBZTdrH3Qt8xRu6KZkLDlO/story.html?camp=pm

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/warren-explains-minority-listing-talks-of-grandfathers-high-cheekbones/

https://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/05/fordham-piece-called-warren-harvard-laws-first-woman-of-color-123526

https://youtu.be/aY8qEUW-BWM

This story shows a picture of Warren's 1986 Texas Bar Association registration card she filled out her own handwriting, claiming that her "Race" was "Native American."

https://www.vox.com/2018/10/16/17983250/elizabeth-warren-bar-application-american-indian-dna

After her election to the US Senate, Warren rose to a prominent and respected place in national politics. She could easily have abandoned her claims or put the whole thing to rest by saying it was simply a family story- and left it at that. Instead, she let Donald Trump's mockery of her claimed Native status - remember he called her "Pocahontas" - stick in her craw. So she dug in her feet and doubled down on her claims of being Native American, in part coz she "couldn't stand by and let Donald Trump call my mother a liar." (paraphrase)

After declaring she was running for the Dem nomination for POTUS, in 2018 Warren pulled a self-serving, juvenile stunt that backfired on her. She released a video in which she claimed she'd had a DNA test done and the results had been analyzed by a geneticist she privately hired who worked in his own lab. Lo and behold, the geneticist found that something like 1.3% of Warren's DNA was of "Native American" biological heritage.

But as it soon came out, the fraction of NA DNA Warren claimed was actually smaller than what a majority of people in North America of various races have. What's more, the DNA material she was said to have was specifically MesoAmerican (eg from Central America) - not from North America, and certainly not Cherokee.

To make matters worse, it turns out that taking a DNA test to prove her supposed Native American, specifically Cherokee, bona fides was an insult to many Native Americans, especially the Cherokee Nation. Coz whether one belongs or doesn't belong to a Native American tribe traditionally has never been based on DNA analysis or any other kind of blood or saliva tests.

Warren herself acknowledged this in her self-promotional video, saying she knows tribal membership is based on carefully-kept written records documenting family lineage that go back to the 1800s. Yet she can't give up. Coz to do so would be to question family stories that she had been told as a child. It's like she's the only woman her age and education to whom it's never occurred that the family stories our older relatives have been telling for years just might consist of bullshit in whole or in part.

In the view of many, Warren's attempt to prove and claim that she was Cherokee by taking a DNA test and hiring a guy to analyze it to prove her point was in and of itself a deeply racist and exploitive act - sort of like an inversion of the old "one drop" rule used to define whether a person was black in the US. Warren seemed to be taking the position that what constitutes a Cherokee should be defined by the elitist, scientific standards of her choosing - standards many Native Americans, including the Cherokee Nation, had rejected.

If Warren had any respect for NAs and the Cherokee people, she would've consulted some of them before she pulled her self-promoting publicity stunt. But apparently she didn't.

Instead, Warren put out an incredibly offensive and cringe-inducing video in which she trumpeted the results of her DNA test, then went on to blather about how she always knew she was Cherokee coz that's what her mama and daddy and meemaw and pawpaw had always said in family stories she'd heard since she was a youngin' - as if it's entirely reasonable for a US Senator pushing 70 to take every family story she heard as a kid as the gospel truth, and as if to question and of it would be an insult to her parents and other forbears.

On screen, Warren asked her brothers and other relatives if they too had heard these same family stories. They all said yes, and based on that they all nodded in agreement that this means the stories must be true. Which seems a strange way to prove a case for anyone - but expecially for a US Senator who used to teach law at two of the USA's leading law schools.

After Warren and her family agreed the stories were true, Warren went on to offer the final piece of "proof" that she and her family are indeed Cherokee: the fact that an ancestor whose portrait hung in her childhood home had "high cheekbones." Which would have been laughable if it weren't so incredibly racist.

In the 2018 video she repeated almost verbatim the same lines she had said on CBS video in 2012:

"As I said, these are my family stories. I have lived in a family that has talked about Native Americans, talked about tribes since I had been a little girl.I still have a picture on my mantel and it is a picture my mother had before that - a picture of my grandfather. And my Aunt Bea has walked by that picture at least a 1,000 times remarked that he - her father, my Papaw -- had high cheek bones like all of the Indians do..."

According to Warren's reasoning, Danish film actor Mads Mikkelsen must be Cherokee too - coz he's got some mighty high cheekbones! Goodness, maybe he's even her Pawpaw.

https://www.politifact.com/article/2017/dec/01/facts-behind-elizabeth-warren-and-her-native-ameri/

https://theintercept.com/2018/10/16/elizabeth-warren-dna-video-native-american-harvard/

Below is a link to Warren's cringey campaign video bragging about her supposed Cherokee heritage, her DNA test, and Pawpaw's cheek bones.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/warren-releases-video-on-her-native-american-heritage--campaign-2018/2018/10/15/65a7061c-d07a-1

Note the way she speaks about her parents. Most people of her age, education and status would say "my mother and my father." But instead Warrren adopts a cornpone affectation, speaking of her parents in inappropriate babytalk, repeatedly referring to them as "mama and daddy" as though she's unaware that these names are not unique to her own parents - pretty much everyone who speaks English in the US has a mama (or mommy) and daddy too.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/warren-releases-video-on-her-native-american-heritage--campaign-2018/2018/10/15/65a7061c-d07a-1

Chuck Hoskin Jr, the Secretary of State of the Cherokee Nation, explains to CNN why what Warren did was offensive:

https://youtu.be/Sjd6ukldfK0