Posted on 05/01/2012 6:50:05 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
If the presidential election can come down to whether it's more offensive to eat dogs or put one in a kennel on top of your car, I guess it's fair for a Senate election to come down to whether Elizabeth Warren is 1/10,000th Cherokee.
The newest front in the "war on women," apparently: Calling a female pol out on her self-serving B.S.
Despite claiming she never used her Native American heritage when applying for a job, Elizabeth Warren’s campaign admitted last night the Democrat listed her minority status in professional directories for years when she taught at the University of Texas and the University of Pennsylvania...
The Herald reported Friday that embattled Harvard Law School officials touted Warren’s Native American heritage — she reportedly has ancestors from the Cherokee and Delaware tribes — as proof of the faculty’s diversity…
Mindy Myers, Warren’s campaign manager, had this to say today:
“If Scott Brown has questions about Elizabeth Warren’s well-known qualifications — from her high marks as a teacher to her nationally recognized work on bankruptcy and the pressures on middle class families – he ought to ask them directly instead of hiding behind the nasty insinuations of his campaign and trying to score political points. Once again, the qualifications and ability of a woman are being called into question by Scott Brown who did the same thing with the Supreme Court nomination of Elena Kagan. It’s outrageous.”
It’s not so much a story about Warren’s heritage, in other words, as whether she lied about it in order to boost her appeal to Harvard as a solution to their diversity problem. According to her campaign, Charles Fried helped recruit her to the school and swears that her ancestry played no part, by which I assume he means that Warren didn’t bring it up in interviews, etc. Fair enough, but as the Herald notes, she was listed as a minority professor in the Association of American Law Schools’ annual directory from 1986 to 1995. She joined Harvard Law as a visiting professor in 1992 and became a full-time prof there in 1995, which means she was still being listed as a minority for a few years while she was there. Did whoever hired her know about that? Via Ace, David Bernstein at the Volokh Conspiracy finds another curiosity:
The old AALS Directory of Faculty guides are online (through academic libraries) at Hein Online. The directories starting listing minority faculty in an appendix in 1986. There’s Elizabeth Warren, listed as a professor at Texas. I spot-checked three additional directories from when she was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, including 1995-96, the year Harvard offered her a position. Elizabeth Warren, Elizabeth Warren, Elizabeth Warren.
So, we know one thing with almost 100% certainty: Elizabeth Warren identified herself as a minority law professor. We know something else with 90%+ certainty: (at least some) folks at Harvard were almost certainly aware that she identified as a minority law professor, though they may not have known which ethnic group she claimed to be belong to, and it may not have played any role in her hiring.
But it gets even more interesting: once Warren joined the Harvard faculty, she dropped off the list of minority law faculty. Now that’s passing strange. When the AALS directory form came around before Warren arrived at Harvard, she was proud enough of her Native American ancestry to ask that she be listed among the minority law professors. (Or, in the unlikely even that she just allowed law school administrators to fill out the forms for her without reviewing them, they were aware that she claimed such ancestry, and she didn’t object when she was listed.) Once she arrived at Harvard, however, she no longer chose to be listed as a minority law professor.
Verrrrrry curious. I’m not hung up on the fact that she apparently can’t produce any documents attesting to her ancestry; that’s not unusual when it comes to genealogy, although it does raise the question of what proof is sufficient to justify claiming minority status. (Follow the link to Bernstein’s post and read down for more on that.) The fact that her name disappeared from the minority listings in the AALS directory is interesting, though. Three possibilities. One: She was lying all along and dropped the charade once her mission of getting a job at Harvard had been accomplished. Two: She sincerely thought she had Native American ancestry but then learned something in 1995 that convinced her otherwise, so she quietly dropped minority status. In that case, though, why is she claiming it now when the press is grilling her on it? Three: Maybe the standards of proof for claiming minority status changed at Harvard or AALS such that Warren felt obliged to drop her official claim. She still thinks of herself as Native American, in other words, but she can’t prove it to the relevant authority’s comfort. That should be easy enough to check, though. Bottom line: If she’s serious about her heritage, why stop acknowledging it in the mid-90s? There’s no obvious explanation.
While you mull that, here’s Scott Brown enjoying one of the greatest moments of retail politics in recent American history.
Is it determined like blackness, by the “one drop” rule?
Yes. There are folks here who hate Scott Brown more than Warren because he's impure, despite the phenomenal improvement he is over Kennedy he replaced, Kerry he serves with or other New Englander Senators.
These cranks lack pragmatism, sense or sanity.
Give the tribe wouldn’t recognize her or even her parent’s “claim,” it’s true shameful for her have claimed “minority” status for employment purposes.
Except, apparently, at Harvard University....
(Other than at Harvard, I could plausibly be arrested for fraud if I tried it -- see below!)
Definition and origins of Native Americans:
Definition. As described in DoD Directive 1350.2 a Native-American or Alaskan Native is a person having origins in the original peoples of North America, AND who maintains cultural identification through tribal affiliation or community recognition.
There is no one contemporary majority definition that establishes a person’s identity as a Native-American. The Bureau of Census states that “anybody who claims to be a Native-American” is a Native-American. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), which is the organization responsible for monitoring Indian affairs and issues, general definition to be a Native-American, you must:
Be 1/4-1/2 Native-American blood at a minimum.
Live on or near trust lands/reservations.
Be on a tribal roll recognized by the federal government.
Trace ancestry back three generations.
Be approved by BIA officials.
As I read it, according to The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) (which should know an Indian when they see one), she isn't an Indian.
This lie will have zero impact in Assachusetts. The people willing to vote for her already accept lies as truth and only harden their opinion when the lies are pointed out to them. There is no more hope for Assachusetts than there is for Clownifornia.
Yeah, I’m something like 1/131000th Powhatan. Even if I could claim something from that I wouldn’t. I’d rather be judged for what I do than my distant ancestors.
I am red haired and blue eyed. I worked for about a year for the Mashantucket Pequot tribe here in Connecticut. The first tribal member I met could have passed for my brother or at least a cousin. He was red haired and blue eyed. The tribe contained all sorts of phenotypes; lots of blondes, red heads, brunettes, whites, blacks even an Indian (as in Bangalore) with no explanation or excuses offered.
I cannot rationally argue with anyone who claims that the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation (as it’s officially known) is a total fraud and a fiction. It does, however, allow a bunch of wannabes to run a casino.
Oh good grief, she’s playing the vagina card?
Thank you for the response. It was a good rebuttal.
We are all ‘related’ if one goes far enough back. My grandmother was a full blooded Indian Squaw. However, I do not claim to be an ‘native American Indian’.
This woman is 1/32 Indian (so she says). Probably had an ancestor somewhere along the line that molested children, so is she also a pedophile?
What native customs was she raised in and does she follow?
If there were no monetary benefit to claiming to be an Indian, how many people like this woman would ‘claim’ to be one?
What you say is true. I agree that her looks don’t prove the case either way.
Now... exactly what is it she does, other than use it to scam government money and power, that is the least bit ‘Indian’? When has she attended a tribal meeting? When has she ever practiced any of the tribal customs?
If she were any good, she wouldn’t have to try to use a crutch to get ahead.
It’s always about the money.
Well... it's been working for everyone else in our Federal Administration.
Or having a top album like EMINEM ?
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