This NBC Reporter Defended Elizabeth Warren While Using Her Race As An Example

I’m of a different mind. And partly because a lot of black and brown people in this country do not have the data to prove where they come from. Partly, that’s because of slave records that weren’t dated. But secondly, because of miscegenation law. So the concept of quantifying culture, that is a white and majority concept. A lot of us had to rely, as a black person of mixed race, on oral tradition to know where we were from. So she’s not saying, “I used this.”

Kelly countered: “She’s not saying she used it, but she did.” Radford argued: “But acknowledging who you are isn’t using who you are.” Kelly pushed back: “It is when you are touted as the first Native American professor at Harvard Law School and you’re not Native American.” Radford proclaimed: “She understood she was Native American.”

Kelly wasn’t buying it:

That’s not good enough. It’s like, we ripped on a woman not long ago, a young high school girl, for wearing a prom dress that was kimono style, saying she was guilty of culture appropriation. That is what people on the left told us, “You’re not allowed to appropriate anybody’s dress or cultures”....Elizabeth Warren is out there representing that she’s got a heritage that, at best, is probably similar to most Americans in this country, none of whom checked the box.

Minutes later, Radford again tried to suggest that any criticism of Warren was somehow racist: “I’m fundamentally uncomfortable. And why do you get to dictate who or what I am? I don’t want someone putting a pencil in my hair to see if it stays to find out if I’m really black.”