The fake news media are now pronouncing that Elizabeth Warren is an American Indian because she claimed she produced a genetic test showing she was about 1%, or perhaps as little as 0.01%, American Indian.  (The actual data behind the alleged test have not been released, being about as opaque as Christine Blasey Ford's polygraph results.)

The liberal media herald this as a vindication of Warren.  "Elizabeth Warren releases DNA test with 'strong evidence' of Native American ancestry," reports Fortune magazine.  "Elizabeth Warren releases DNA test with 'strong evidence' of Native American ancestry," claims the Clinton News Network.

Strong evidence?  A great, great, great grandmother, or possibly someone even more distant than that?  It's ridiculous and also alarming, as the mainstream media parrot the Democratic talking points, even characterizing an obvious lie as the truth.

The point that everyone overlooks is, why, even if Warren is (finally) being truthful about her heritage, would someone who is 99% white and 1% (or less) American Indian want to be called American Indian?  Are there American Indians who are 1% white who want to be called white?  I think not.

That's because in America, being a white person is considered bad, and minorities are considered virtuous.

In America today, white people are considered suspect racists at best, guilty until proven innocent.  Even if they aren't consciously racist, we are told they may harbor unconscious racism, which conveniently can never be purged, or detected, but is always there – just like man-made global warming.

Minorities, however, are virtuous because they are by definition oppressed.  Any minority living in America is deemed to have been discriminated against by white people.  You just have to be careful about defining what a minority is.  A person from Slovakia or Ireland or Norway is not a minority.  These people are simply white.  Also defining Chinese-Americans as minorities is problematic, as they do not tend to underperform as other minorities from broken families and failing cultures often do.

But in general, that label of "oppressed" gives minorities a patina of virtuousness.  "People of Color" says it all – all who are not white, despite widely differing backgrounds, are identical in their virtuousness due to their oppression (past, present, and future) at the hands of white people.  When they speak out, the liberal media amplify their voices and give them authenticity (as long as they are not conservatives, in which case they are Uncle Toms or mentally ill).  The media breathlessly report stories every day about nonwhite lawyers, doctors, scientists, and engineers, in such crude ways that it seems pretty clear that the focus of the story is not social science, but identity politics.

And then there is the P.C. cultural propaganda that shows nonwhites and nonwhite culture to be superior to European-American norms.  In television, movies, and books, minority characters are always portrayed as brilliant, brave, and noble.  For the most part, white male characters have been reduced to playing villains.  In television commercials, white men are portrayed as idiots, while minorities are portrayed as "cool" and "hip."  It starts early, in school textbooks, where a disproportionate share of children in stories who are bold and virtuous are non-white.  Every time I get an advertisement from my bank or insurance company, I am greeted by the image of a grinning non-white person.  It's as if they no longer consider the possibility of marketing to white people, or as if they think they can market better to white people with nonwhite models, hoping their ascribed virtuousness will rub off on their company.

Under these circumstances, is it any wonder that a woman with one drop of American Indian blood would rather be American Indian than white?  Is it any surprise that the liberal media, which celebrate identity politics, would play along with this sham?

It's merely a symptom of the deeper racial illness that infects American culture, which celebrates nonwhite identities over white ones.

Ed Straker is the senior editor of Newsmachete.com.