In an article in The Boston Globe, Brian McGrory inadvertently highlights Massachusetts’ original sin.

Warren gave far and away her most elaborate and emotional responses to questions over why she still believes she has Native American heritage, despite a lack of documented evidence. She revealed that her parents eloped because of tensions between their two families over her mother’s ancestry.

Her family is not known to have an official affiliation or any registration with an Indian tribe, and any sparse indications that a great-great-great grandmother had Cherokee blood would fall short of federal guidelines that would grant Warren minority status. Warren was born and raised in Oklahoma.

“In the 1930s, when my parents got married, these were hard issues,’’ Warren said. “My father’s family so objected to my mother’s Native American heritage that my mother told me they had to elope.

“As kids, my brothers and I knew about that. We knew about the differences between our two families. And we knew how important my mother’s heritage was to her. This was real in my life. I can’t deny my heritage. I can’t and I won’t. That would be denying who my mother was, who my family was, how we lived, and I won’t do it.’’

Apparently Warren’s mother was Native American enough to be recognized as such and discriminated for it in Oklahoma.  In Massachusetts, these days she is not considered Native American enough.

Reminds me of when I was in High School.  A friend and fellow DeMolay member complained to me that “the damn Jews were taking over the organization.”   I said, “You are aware that I am Jewish, aren’t you?”  His reply was “No you’re not.”

I remember the days when it could be a traumatic experience for a black person to be discovered as having been passing as white.  There were even movies about such things.  Now we are complaining that Elizabeth Warren is not passing for white.

I have long learned that there are people who will disparage you or take umbrage at you no matter what you do.  What set me free from attempts to induce guilt on me for my actions was to realize that the problem was theirs, not mine.

When, in the 1970s, I was talking to a black person who had moved here from St. Louis, he told me that Massachusetts was the most de facto segregated place he had ever lived. I said that I could empathize with his dismay.  Although my minority status as Jewish was not so obvious to the casual passer-by as his minority status, I still had an understanding of how people from the dominant culture had no idea of what it was like to be a minority.

For those that don’t get the reference of the headline, our treatment of native Americans, slavery, and racial discrimination have been considered by many outside observers as the original sin of our democratic country.  It is too bad that we have still not put the last remnants of that sin aside.