Just as Tracy Morgan learned that “gay” trumps “black” in the media’s politically correct pecking order, the Cherokee are about to discover that “American Indian” does not trump “pasty-white, wealthy female leftist who could unseat a sitting Republican in the U.S. Senate.”
The media will do all they can to mitigate any political damage the Cherokee might do to Elizabeth Warren, no matter how many falsehoods Warren has been caught telling about her heritage and how guilty she might be of stealing the Cherokee identity.
Which is why this is not a much bigger story:
Four outraged Cherokee activists who say Elizabeth Warren’s campaign has ignored their emails and phone calls will trek to Boston this week in hopes they can force a meeting with the Democratic Senate candidate over her “offensive” Native American heritage claims.
“It’s almost becoming extremely offensive to us,” said Twila Barnes, a Cherokee genealogist who has researched Warren’s family tree. “We’re trying to get in contact and explain why her behavior hurts us and is offensive, and she totally ignores that. Like we don’t exist.”
Late last night, a Warren campaign official told the Herald that staffers will “connect” and “offer to have staff meet with them.”
Dozens of times over the years, we’ve seen the same media-pattern repeated. If you offend someone above you in the media’s politically correct pecking order, in a unrelenting media fury, you are pressured to meet with them and make it right. This, the media tells you, is one way to make the story go away.
Of course, you also have to offer a mea culpa to the offended party, admit your wrong-doing, and grovel an apology.
If Warren were a Republican, as it was played and replayed over and over again, imagine how familiar we would all be by now with video of these four “outraged Cherokee activists” demanding Warren meet with them.
“We would like to see her look at the documentation and admit there’s no Indian ancestry there and then apologize,” Barnes [said]. “Hear us. Acknowledge us. Know that she’s brought us into this. We didn’t bring ourselves into this. This whole trip was planned to get a meeting with her.”
But as we all know, the media is every bit as eager as Warren for this story to go away. So while the Boston Herald reported the events, almost no one else did.
Under normal circumstances, angry Cherokee activists would be a major, national media story. Aggrieved American Indians are almost always a media dream come true. And in this case, the Cherokee have every right to be upset. Unfortunately for them, though, the media has a pecking order in these kinds of showdowns, and the Cherokee just don’t rank above a privileged, elitist, great white 2012 hope.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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