"Warren, a Harvard Law School professor who is running for Senate in Massachusetts against Scott Brown, has said that she is one thirty-second Cherokee—which, under tribal rules, could be enough—and there is apparently genealogical evidence to back her up. What makes her identification with the tribe feel scattershot, if not outright opportunistic, is that she reportedly only listed herself publicly that way from about 1986 until the mid-nineties, in her first academic posts, and then stopped doing so after getting the appointment at Harvard. This is why the Boston Herald, which broke the story, has taken to calling her 'Fauxcahontas.'
"When first asked about the directory listing, she told the Herald,
I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am. Nothing like that ever happened, that was clearly not the use for it and so I stopped checking it off.
"She put herself down as Native American for the lunch invitations, and stopped when none were forthcoming? Hearing that from a woman who knows how to be straightforward—and who would now surely be able to issue some invitations on her own—one can’t help but wince. ... The problem is that even if you accept Warren’s explanation entirely at face value—that this was all about a Native American woman looking for other Native Americans to talk to—it doesn’t sound good. She doesn’t appear to have looked very hard, for one thing. No one has an obligation to be a spokesman or advocate for any ethnic group, or to turn one’s life into a readable catalog. And yet what Warren is saying is that when she was a junior faculty member, and relatively powerless, she opened herself up, waiting to be asked; as a senior professor, and in a position to be the asker, or at least a resource, she took her name off the list."
The dynamic evidence page
5 comments:
How Native American is she? By fuzzy logic, 1/32 x 1/32 = 1/1024 (the degree of her membership in the set "Native American"). That sounds about right. Her cheekbones are not that high.
Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pudd%27nhead_Wilson on Mark Twain's _Pudd'nhead Wilson_: "Puddn'head Wilson moves into the background as the focus shifts to the slave Roxy, her son, and the family they serve. Roxy is only one-sixteenth black, and her son Valet de Chambre (referred to as "Chambers") is only 1/32 black. Roxy is principally charged with caring for her inattentive master's infant son Tom Driscoll, who is the same age as her own son. After fellow slaves are caught stealing and are nearly sold "down the river", to a master further south, Roxy fears for her life and the life of her son. First she decides to kill herself and Chambers to avoid being sold down the river, but then decides instead to switch Chambers and Tom in their cribs so that her son will live a life of privilege."
Would a DNA test settle the question of the extent of Ms. Warren's Native American ancestry? It might. But it wouldn't settle the question of her veracity: People genuinely believe all sorts of outlandish things.
If Elizabeth Warren is Native American, George Zimmerman may be "black": "Whatever the case, it was assumed early on that Zimmerman was white, and perhaps of Ashkenazic Jewish background due to his last name. As time wore on, though, facts came to light which illustrated his Latino background and Roman Catholicism. Beyond any of this, however, new biographical details have revealed themselves, and they entail plot twists worthy of an early John Grisham novel.
"First off, Zimmerman is not only a minority, but the same kind that Martin was. Apparently, an old family photo shows that one of the man's great grandfathers was Afro-Peruvian. Furthermore, for all of that talk about Zimmerman being a far-right racist lunatic, he is a registered Democrat." Joseph Cotto, "George Zimmerman: Partially black, registered Democrat, and still a mystery," http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/conscience-realist/2012/may/15/george-zimmerman-black-democrat/
Boston.com [Boston Globe}, http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2012/05/25/federal_documents_indicate_harvard_repeatedly_reported_elizabeth_warren_as_native_american/:
"US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren has said she was unaware that Harvard Law School had been promoting her purported Native American heritage until she read about it in a newspaper several weeks ago.
"But for at least six straight years during Warren’s tenure, Harvard University reported in federally mandated diversity statistics that it had a Native American woman in its senior ranks at the law school. According to both Harvard officials and federal guidelines, those statistics are almost always based on the way employees describe themselves.
"In addition, both Harvard’s guidelines and federal regulations for the statistics lay out a specific definition of Native American that Warren does not meet.
"The documents suggest for the first time that either Warren or a Harvard administrator classified her repeatedly as Native American in papers prepared for the government in a way that apparently did not adhere to federal diversity guidelines. They raise further questions about Warren’s statements that she was unaware Harvard was promoting her as Native American."
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