Is Union Theological Seminary's president, Serene Jones, a Cherokee?

Serene Jones is a well-regarded theologian: professor at Yale for 17 years, president of Union Theological Seminary for the last 12. She is considered “liberal” in her theology, a characterization which I find less than illuminating. Certainly she questions whether the resurrection of Jesus actually took place. That sounds like a less-than-conservative religious stance. She also treats racism as a sin, which seems to be a politically liberal view, but not theologically, considering Paul’s teachings in the Epistle to the Galatians and the statement in Genesis that we are created in the image of God. And her clear preference for the thinking of John Calvin marks a theological conservatism.

In her 2019 memoir, Call It Grace, Jones returns to a story she has told before, about her racist grandfather, Judge Dick Jones, and about the 1911 lynching of Laura and L.D. Nelson in her family’s hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma. She is horrified  by the possibility - perhaps probability - that her family members participated and by the certainty that they at least knew who did…and did nothing about it. But she also makes the claim, all-too-common among white Oklahomans, of Cherokee ancestry.  And I find it deeply disturbing.

Over the last year or so the whole country has been alerted to another Oklahoma-born Ivy League professor’s claim of Cherokee ancestry. President Trump made fun of Senator Elizabeth Warren for it; she doubled down with a DNA test while disclaiming tribal membership. If you insist on seeing issues like this through a partisan lens, that’s what you know. If you listen to Native voices you will have heard anger about her “pretendianism.” Oklahoma is rife with this because of the history of white people stealing Indigenous identity in order to steal tribal land. Angie Debo’s 1936 And Still the Waters Run is the classic account of the multiple forms this swindle took. David Grann’s 2017 Killers of the Flower Moon details the murders of whole families of Osages by white men who married in for their allotments.

Professor Jones’s story is more specific than Senator Warren’s vague story of a Cherokee ancestor. She identifies a great-grandfather - Judge Jones’s father, Redman Jones - as Cherokee. She even tells us in her memoir that Redman Jones was forced to change his race to white at statehood because Oklahoma’s Jim Crow laws made it illegal for him to own land as a Cherokee.

Except Native land ownership in Oklahoma was not illegal.

Except Oklahoma’s Jim Crow laws applied to Black people but not to Natives.

Except Okemah was located in the Creek Nation, not the Cherokee Nation.

Except it doesn’t take a professional genealogist to find reasons to doubt this story.

The Dawes Allotment Rolls were a comprehensive effort to identify every Native in Indian Territory (eastern Oklahoma) before statehood and to issue each of them a parcel of land in order to break up collective ownership by the tribes. This is not the place for a discussion of the reasons for this policy, for the restrictions the legislation placed on immediate sale by the owners, or for the ways unscrupulous lawyers and speculators found to subvert those restrictions. It is enough to say that those rolls provide an early 20th Century census for the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole tribes so that people seeking membership today can show their relationship to those people as evidence. The Dawes Rolls are readily available online.

It takes a few seconds to discover that there was no Redman Jones in the Dawes Rolls.

Old US Census records are also readily available online. It takes a few seconds to discover that there was a Redman B. Jones living on Fourth Street in Okemah, Oklahoma at the time of the 1910 census. He was - as Professor Serene Jones says - identified as a white man, with a wife and four children. So is her story correct? Was Redman passing as white? Had his ancestors been forced out of the old Cherokee lands in the southeast on the Trail of Tears?

According to the census, Redman was born in Tennessee, as were his parents. So was his wife Dollie and her parents. So were three of his four children, all except the youngest, the two-year old, who was born in Oklahoma. I find this suggestive, not probative. It suggests that Redman Jones moved to Oklahoma right around the time of statehood and was not a member of a Cherokee family who had been living there since the 1830’s. But it leaves me room for doubt. Perhaps he reported all this to a census worker in order to buttress his claim of whiteness.

It takes a few more minutes to track Redman back to Coffee, Tennessee in the 1880 census, four years old and still white, with two white parents. Here his name is spelled Redmon, so is it the same person? Or is this just an easily-explainable coincidence? Well, if it is the latter then it is more than one coincidence. Back in Tennessee in 1880, four year-old Redmon’s father is named Carroll. In Oklahoma in 1910 Redman’s eight year-old son is also named Carroll. Toddler Redmon’s infant brother is named Alvah. Grown-up Redman has a son named… do I need to spell this out? Okay, his six year-old is also name Alvah.

All of us have family stories. And sometimes our oral history is more accurate than written records. I have spent too much time looking for people in archives who have clearly gone out of their way to make themselves invisible to the authorities. I know people who have trouble proving their identity because at the time of their birth nobody in authority thought it worth documenting. Grown men who played professional baseball with my father-in-law (who would be either 105 or 103 now if he were still with us, the records are unclear) reminisced with him about specific stories of their travels and games. But I find no evidence of him in the archives. I suspect he played under an alias because he was underage when he dropped out of college to play professionally. (14? 16?)

But Professor Jones’s story about her great-grandfather is no invisible in the archives. It is contradicted by them, which is a whole other story. Moreover, it fits a pattern of identity theft that was all too common. I do not blame her for believing what she was told as a child. We all do that. I don’t even blame her for carrying this story into adulthood. I do have some problems, though.

When Professor Jones left Yale for Union Theological Seminary in 2008 the Yale Daily News described her as a member of the Cherokee tribe and said this left Yale with only one Native faculty member to represent and counsel Native students. This is disturbing. It suggests that it wasn’t just her ancestors engaged in identity theft.

The public discussion of Senator Warren’s claims of Cherokee identity dates back at least to the 2012 Senate race when her opponent, Scott Brown, denounced (and mocked) her for it. Just as Yale listed Serene Jones as a Native member of their faculty, Elizabeth Warren was listed as a Native member of the Harvard faculty. By February of 2019, the difference between family story and tribal membership had reached a sufficient volume that Senator Warren issued a public apology for claiming to be Cherokee. She apologized earlier (although privately) to the Cherokee Nation. So why is Dr. Jones still making similar claims six months later in a summer 2019 Chautauqua interview with Krista Tippett that aired on the NPR show On Being in early December? Serene Jones is a theologian, not a historian of Native America. But one might imagine that the very high profile discussions of the very similar case of Elizabeth Warren would at least have triggered some curiosity. Well, that’s what I would imagine.

Moreover, as I noted above, Professor Jones has a lot to say about race, and about personal responsibility. She is curious about her ancestors’ part in the lynching of Laura and L.D. Nelson. Why the incuriosity about the theft of Native identity? Why the incuriosity about the theft of Native land? Okemah, Oklahoma was founded in 1902 on the tribal allotments of Mahala and Nocus Fixico, members of the Muskogee Creek Nation. According to federal law, the absolute earliest date on which that land could have been transferred was 1906! (Had you ever wondered why white Oklahomans call themselves “sooners”?) The Fixicos were eventually awarded $50 per acre, but by the Department of the Interior, not by the town of Okemah.

I will just add that the lynching of the Nelson’s was memorialized by the creation of a souvenir picture postcard which was sold in the town of Okemah for years. I will add that the townspeople’s memory of that incident was of their fear that there would be violent retaliation by their Black neighbors. I will add that the word “townspeople” doesn’t require the modifier “white” because Okemah was a sundown town from the time of its founding. I will add that it was the county seat and that Black residents of the county had business in the courts and so a segregated hotel was built to accommodate them, but that it was dynamited in 1907 by - of course - “some persons, who have never been identified, under the cover of darkness.” Some things don’t change. 

We got out about half an hour before dawn this morning. Under the trees there wasn't much moonlight and the only way I could follow the trail was by memory. Prophet had a much easier time with it, but he was preoccupied with some other critters who were still out. Opossums? Raccoons? Coyotes? I have no idea. I just know he was following scent trails into the brush and doing a lot of barking. I also know that I couldn't read his body language because I couldn't see him.

Dawn is so different that dusk because the light is following your eyes' adjustment to the dark instead of the other way around. After the first ten minutes of feeling my way along I was able to walk with more confidence because I could see the rocks and the uneven surface. But I was also able to see the river and the Palisades on the other side. I often get to see the light traveling down the cliffs as the sun rises, even while our side is still in shadows, blocked by the Spuyten Duyvil-Riverdale ridge. This morning, though, I was seeing the cliffs lit more diffusely, by the entire brightening sky. I have no words to describe it, but it was riveting. I kept stopping just to look.

Prophet was still chasing around after those mysterious critters. I am always aware of his parallel sensory universe, in which the landmarks and objects of interest he notes overlap with mine but do not coincide. This morning it seemed as though the overlapping zone was much smaller than usual. We were attending to totally different things and were largely unaware - incapable of being aware - of what was interesting the other.

This dog is a gift. He gets me up and out every day. He gets me looking and thinking. He lifts my spirits. I try to do the same for him.

So the Twitter challenge was:

“if you like ‘the squad’ and hate bernie, please share why! i think saying it out loud will help you realize it’s at least a little silly. or maybe it’ll give the rest of us something to think about, who knows” 

Putting an answer in 240 characters really was tough. The people who responded with some version of “Bernie really had no position on #BlackLivesMatter” got two basic responses:

1. Bernie has gotten much better on that subject
2. Bernie’s programs will really benefit Black people

It is that second answer - invariably given by a white person - that I find so problematic and that I don’t think yields to a tweet-length rejoinder… unless it is calling that white someone out for being so certain they understand racism better than Black people do.

Socialism in America has historically stumbled on the issue of race. Last year at this time I suggested  that Bernie knows this and that it accounts for his move to Vermont half a century ago. I wrote:

In Vermont (95% white) he could talk about labor and capital without talking about race. Brooklyn, where Bernie grew up, is -- by contrast -- 36% white, 35% African American, 20% Latino and 12% Asian. Roughly half the people speak a language other than English when they are in their homes.

Those numbers actually understate the reality. In 1968 the African American population of Vermont was 0.2%. Even today it is only 1%, third lowest in the country after Idaho and Wyoming. But Bernie Sanders was not the first person who decided that his class analysis was clouded by discussion of race. He won’t be the last.

A century ago Eugene V. Debs ran for President of the United States on the Socialist Party line. He didn’t get out to campaign because he was locked up in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for his opposition to World War 1. Debs was an opponent of racism in America and in the Socialist Party. He famously wrote: “The man who seeks to arouse prejudice among workingmen is not their friend. He who advises the white wage-worker to look down upon the black wage-worker is the enemy of both." 

There were explicit racists in the Socialist Party of Debs’s day. Victor Berger, the Socialist congressman from Milwaukee, was one. Kate Richards O’Hare, the Socialist candidate for Senator of Missouri was another. Debs said that this view was a “stench in the nostrils of honest men.”

It is important to note that this isn’t American exceptionalism. Throughout the imperialist countries there were people calling themselves “socialist” - leaders of Socialist Parties even - who believed in the “civilizing mission” of colonialism. That’s right, they claimed to be anticapitalist while demanding the wages of whiteness. One hundred years ago those countries were overwhelmingly white and so they could pretend to be parties of the “working class” as if the laboring people in the colonies were something else. Today these countries are home to millions of people from their former colonies and those who object are all open racists. But not here.

But what about the Debs camp? Surely in an era of open and violent disfranchisement, of forcible segregation, of frequent public lynching any socialist who believed in human equality would have spoken out against the structure of white supremacy? No. Here’s Debs himself again:

I have said and say again that, properly speaking, there is no Negro question outside of the labor question—the working class struggle. Our position as Socialists and as a party is perfectly plain. We have simply to say: “The class struggle is colorless.” The capitalists, white, black and other shades, are on one side and the workers, white, black and all other colors, on the other side

Nothing about lynching. Nothing about phony literacy tests or poll taxes. Nothing about segregation. And it all sounds terribly familiar, too. When Bernie supporters say “He is pursuing social programs that would improve the lives of vast majority of black people” they are making the exact same point as Debs, that the class struggle is all we need.

But it just isn’t so. Ever since Trump’s election we have been hectored by pundits about a “white working class” as a rationale for shutting up about racist violence and atrocities against refugees at our southern border. These pundits claim to be personally opposed to racism and xenophobia, but they talk about the danger of antagonizing this "white working class." Here are my thoughts about that “class.” These people clearly believe that stopping the horrors of white supremacy is of secondary importance to… well, to whatever they think is primary. They are clearly willing to sacrifice the lives of people of color to some value that they hold more highly. This goes beyond white privilege to white supremacism.

The history of the United States shows a repeated unwillingness to include Black people, Natives, Mexican Americans and Asians when the government was supporting families and enterprises, whether that was with land in the 19th century or with farm products and jobs in the 20th. Instead, the courts supported robbery from them. The result is monstrous discrepancies in generational wealth. But people of color are asked to believe that this time will be different. 

I am in favor of Medicare for All.

I am in favor of extending free public education through college.

I am in favor of a $15 minimum wage.

I am in favor of a job guarantee, expanded Social Security and a Green New Deal.

But when racial justice is sixteenth on your platform and when most of the details deal with general economic and environmental issues, I question the depth of your understanding and commitment.

I voted for Bernie in the 2016 primary. If we were having the 2020 primary today, I would likely vote for him again. But I am underenthusiastic. By contrast, I am very enthusiastic about Representatives Tlaib, Omar, Pressley, and Ocasio-Cortez. They are outspoken and active in support of economic and environmental justice. They are also women. They are also Palestinian, Somali, African American and Puerto Rican. I don’t have to insist that they “marched with Dr. King” fifty-plus year’s ago or wonder whether they really understand American racism. They live it every day.

So I don’t “hate Bernie” but that’s why I prefer “the squad.” Maybe you can put that in 240 characters. I can’t.

Why are House Democrats attacking their brightest new stars?

The House Democratic leadership is now campaigning openly against first-term Representatives Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. These women are already the subjects of daily death threats from Trump world. They have made climate change a campaign issue despite the best efforts of both Democrats and Republicans. They dragged public attention back to the concentration camps on the border after the press had moved on. 
But Nancy Pelosi says they have no following. There is a concerted push to get Ocasio-Cortez to fire her outspoken chief of staff, which is a transparent effort to “break” her. And leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus are bizarrely claiming that Tlaib, Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley and their camp are “targeting” Black Representatives.

Let’s fact check that last one: Pressley and Omar are Black. Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez challenged and defeated white members of the House Democratic leadership. In my district an ally of theirs, Jamal Bowman, (a Black middle-school principal) is challenging Eliot Engel, a sixteen-term white Representative. A leader of the Black caucus, Representative Lacy Clay is being challenged in the upcoming primary, by Black Lives Matter activist Cori Bush.

Why the apparent distraction? Why fight one another instead of Donald Trump and the Republicans?

To career politicians, re-election is more important than anything. For election purposes Trump is a reliable foil for Democratic politicians; Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, and Tlaib, though, are an existential threat. Trump allows Democrats to avoid stating any political positions of their own. All they have to do is point at him and yell: “We’re not as bad as he is!” Meanwhile - just like the Republicans - they continue to fund their campaigns with donations from the fossil-fuel, pharmaceutical, private prison, and finance industries. They are handcuffed by those donors, unable to make any changes that would benefit us for fear of cutting off their income stream.

Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Tlaib, and Omar have a different campaign finance model. They rely on small-dollar donations from regular people. They are free to take positions that would alienate corporate capitalists. They are also free to call for an end to the systematic legal bribery of our representatives that masquerades as “campaign contribution.”

Yesterday an anonymous Democratic leader told a reporter, “Nobody is afraid of those nerds.” This person was referring to Tlaib, Pressley, Omar, and Ocasio-Cortez. (The irony of saying “nobody is afraid” under the cloak of anonymity seems to have escaped him or her.) But the boast begs the question: Should they be?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did successfully challenge Joe Crowley, a ten-term incumbent and the chair of the Democratic caucus.

Ayanna Pressley did successfully challenge ten-term incumbent Mike Capuano.

Those are not achievements to be overlooked, and establishment Democrats will not be overlooking challengers this time around, regardless of what this anonymous leader said. It remains to be seen whether Jamal Bowman can upset Eliot Engel. (I am hopeful.) It remains to be seen whether attorney Jessica Cisneros can upset eight-term Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar.

That is all far from the number-one story this weekend because President Trump has promised massive ICE kidnappings all across the United States. He isn’t satisfied with the concentration camps he already runs: separating families, holding desperate refugees in inhuman conditions that were attested to yesterday by Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Lindsay Graham. No, he wants to arrest thousands of current US residents, too. This requires all our attention.

But:

We won’t get a humane immigration policy just by voting for Democrats instead of Republicans.

We won’t get fair pharmaceutical prices just by voting for Democrats instead of Republicans.

We won’t get rational health care just by voting for Democrats instead of Republicans.

We won’t get a program to respond to runaway climate change just by voting for Democrats instead of Republicans.

We certainly won’t end racial injustice or income inequality just by voting for Democrats instead of Republicans.

Tell me that the Republicans are worse and I will concede your point. But we are fighting for our children’s lives. Politicians who point at Orange Hitler and yell, “We’re not as bad as he is!” won’t save us. And if we don’t pay attention to elections up and down the ballot, replacing Orange Hitler won’t either.

Bad Faith Commentary on Ocasio-Cortez

I generally avoid reading the comments on widely-distributed public posts. The viciousness and stupidity that pop up so quickly are discouraging to me.

Some of it, though, is intentional trolling.

This week Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez correctly named the concentration camps in which our government keeps asylum seekers. Suddenly actual antisemites were pretending deep concern that she was diminishing the horror of the Nazi holocaust. People who would rather see me dead wanted me to denounce AO-C because she said “concentration camp” without CBP gassing people to death en masse.

Now I see this same type of trolling in the comments on an Ocasio-Cortez fundraising post. She notes - accurately - that most Representatives have to spent the majority of their working hours phoning deep-pocket donors, begging for campaign contributions, instead of doing the people’s business, ie actually going to Congressional meetings. She explains that her ability to work on legislation and to skip the phone solicitations in her party’s call center is dependent on small-dollar online donations. She asks that the reader click a link to make one of those donations.

Most of the comments on this post were positive. It’s still Facebook so I have to wonder how many of these people think they are contributing when they reply with some equivalent of “You go, girl” instead of clicking the link and sending $5, but, oh well. It was the trolls that caught my eye.
The clever ones didn’t go directly for her and identify themselves as enemies. One angrily demanded to know why we shou politicians who spend all their time fundraising. When people pointed out that this was EXACTLY THE POINT of AO-C’s post, the troll just kept doubling down. I sincerely hope that nobody is that obtuse. She was intentionally creating a false equivalence between AO-C and establishment politicians at the same time as discouraging participation in the process.

Then there are the people complaining that she is fighting against Joe Biden instead of against Donald Trump. That is transparently false. So I ask, “Who is served by that lie?” The answer is: So many people. Establishment Democrats who don’t want to be accountable for their complicity with monopoly capitalism. Republicans who like seeing their adversaries fighting one another. Foreign adversaries (Russia) who work to disrupt out electoral process. Foreign allies (Israel) who work to obscure their reliance on US military support. The truth is that Representative Ocasio-Cortez has worked hard to support Speaker Pelosi despite her waffling on important issues like immigration, the climate crisis, and the lawless Trump Administration. So have Representatives Omar, Tlaib, and Pressley.

But the aim of trolls is not to challenge our biases. It’s not even to spread lies. The aim of trolls is to make us suspicious and cynical. The aim of trolls is to get us bickering with each other. The aim of trolls is to discourage us.

Don’t give in to trolls.

No Excuses

Six years ago my friend got a phone call from the highly-regarded, “no-excuses” charter school her son attended. He was scheduled to get on a plane the next day with his abuela to spend the summer visiting the country of her birth. The school, though, said that if he did not attend and pass summer school he would have to repeat sixth grade.

His mom canceled his flight. Grandma went without him. He attended summer school and passed. But in late August the school phoned again. This time they said that he would be promoted to seventh grade ONLY IF HE TRANSFERRED to another school!

Why were they so anxious to force him out? What was the character flaw that made him undesirable to that community?

Empathy.

His sin was empathy.

In “no-excuses” schools, children are supposed to keep their eyes on their teacher. When that teacher berates a classmate, the children are not supposed to look at their friend to see how they are taking it. Compliments? Likewise. The same with discussions that have personal subtexts for some kids. All this “focus” was beyond a boy who cared so deeply about his peers. His eyes strayed from his teachers. He checked in constantly with his classmates. He was repeatedly disciplined for it. Now the school administrators made it clear that they wanted him to leave.

He did.

He found a place in a public school downtown, one that values children, not data.

Friday was his graduation. Each senior was called up to receive their diploma by a teacher who knew them well and who said a few words about them. We heard about original research in neuroscience. We heard about leadership on the soccer pitch. We heard about musicianship and mathematical imagination and poetry. We did not hear about anybody’s GPA or their AP exam scores.

When my friend’s son was called to get his diploma his teacher choked up. He wept and said someday he hopes to have a son  with this boy’s empathy.

His empathy.

Six years after being virtually expelled from the first school for empathy, the entire student body of the second - along with their parents and teachers- applauded and roared their approval for him and for his empathy.

Which school would you prefer for your child? 

I know my answer.

More DNA Commerce!

AncestryDNA sent me an email today urging me to get the DNA of "my entire biological family" tested. Following the link I got a bold-face question: "How Many DNA Tests Does One Family Need?" along with a question to answer that question: "How many people are in your family?"

A couple of years ago my brother gave me a DNA test kit as a gift. This is a commercial transaction, not a scientific one; AncestryDNA is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ancestry LLC, a for-profit entity based in Lehi, Utah. So what was exchanged in this transaction?

AncestryDNA got whatever money my brother gave them along with my entire genome to add to their database of 15 million people.

I got the earth-shattering news that I am an Ashkenazic Jew. (Irony alert: I may have always known that.)

Presumably there are some limits to people's curiosity about their ethnic origins and molecular genealogy companies are concerned about what those limits mean to their bottom lines. Presumably whatever schemes these companies have for monetizing our genomes can be better served with more data from more people. So it makes good sense to me that they would urge us to get tests done on every single member of our families: more short-term payments and more data in their proprietary data bases.

But what exactly are they selling me? Will I learn with scientific certainty that I have my uncle's eyes? (Irony alert: I may have always known that.) Will my brother be a member of a different ethnic group? Will I need to join a synagogue?

I do not want to belittle the benefits of DNA tests for curious adoptees. I don't share their experience and - for them - the more data out there the better. I do want to question the motives of for-profit molecular DNA companies. I do want to question their outsized scientific claims.