Monday, May 7, 2012

Meet Elizabeth Warren—Native American

California is not the only liberal state with candidates who routinely lie and exaggerate those parts of their lives which will appeal to their large politically-correct constituency. If you can’t be a black woman, or a wise Latina, there’s always your popular victim ethnic background—be a Native American. I would use the old-fashioned “Indian,” but the Democrats have already proven they don’t much like Bobby Jindal.

So---here’s Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts Senatorial candidate. She’s running against Republican Scott Brown. Brown won the seat that had been called the “Kennedy seat” for decades, handing the Democrats a very embarrassing defeat. The Democrats are not about to let that white, pickup-driving man hold onto that seat. So they picked a woman who has in the past claimed to be a Native American. In fact, it was one of the items which originally got her teaching positions at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard.

The truth is that Warren is about as much a Native American as her counterpart, the disgraced Ward Churchill, former professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The number of Americans whose families have been here for a long time includes a great many who have some Native American blood. Most are proud of their heritage, but rarely declare themselves Native Americans when their genes are 1/32 or less tribal. If anything Warren says about her bloodline is true, she is at most 1/32 Native American.

Warren first tried to establish her political bona fides with the common folk of Massachusetts by calling herself “the Okie from Harvard.” She was indeed born in Oklahoma City, but has spent most of her life living elsewhere, including New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. But before she tried to pass off that ½ truth, she first did her 1/32 truth in order to get preference for her teaching positions. When early reports came out showing that she had at least distorted her ethnic heritage in order to get preference for teaching positions, she waffled.

Instead of addressing directly the issue of her thin Native American bloodline, she indignantly denied that she had ever used that heritage to gain an advantage over other applicants for the positions. Even if that was partially true, there’s no question that she enhanced the original story as she moved from job to job, by calling herself a “minority professor.” She attended professional meetings and forums specifically as a minority professor. But knowing the best defense is a good offense, she got officials at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, University of Texas, and the University of Houston to state the she had not used her Native American heritage in order to get teaching positions there.

Well, what else would you expect? The criteria for hiring one potential professor over another are very arcane and secretive, and in this day of affirmative action backlash and anti-discrimination public hiring laws, no institution is going to admit that ethnicity was a determining factor. Still, those same universities proudly went along with Warren’s description of herself as a minority professor. Needless to say, Warren is blaming Scott Brown partisans for raising a “phony issue.” The mainstream media are assisting Warren, of natch. The Washington Post asks "why is this non-issue being treated as if it were important news?"

For a law professor and now a professional politician, Warren is not very good at deflecting criticism or arguing a point coherently (which actually qualifies her to be Barack Obama’s next Supreme Court nominee). At a recent press conference, Warren babbled about her use of the minority professor gambit. “I listed myself for nearly a decade as a minority law teacher in order to connect with others like me.” She then stumbled over why she de-listed herself as a minority professor when she no longer needed the leg up.

And then she managed to prove herself another racist liberal by stating that she never really claimed to be a Native American, "it was all about stories passed on in her family for decades." Most importantly, she identifies with Native Americans because her grandfather “had the high cheekbones possessed by all Native Americans." Is that anything like “a typical white person?” The schools she taught at never listed her as being specifically Native American, but went along with the minority professor gag. She alone embellished her tribal roots.

If Harvard wasn’t affected by her claims which resulted in her hiring and granting of tenure, they did a very good imitation of it. When administration officials were questioned about the issue, the reply was that even though they had never hired a professor from a second-tier law school for a professor’s position, her expertise on debtor/creditor law pushed her into top contention. And they were proud to have such a notable minority professor. The Harvard Crimson was a bit less scrupulous about her claims. The campus paper published several articles in which Warren touted her connections to the Delaware and Cherokee tribes.

In the long run, this may be a tempest in a teapot. But given her exaggerations about being the Okie Harvard professor and a Native American, one has to wonder what else she has been distorting about her life and credentials. If this turns out to be a pattern, she may find that her attempts to blend in with the non-Harvard elite and to match Scott Brown’s genuine middle class values will end up simply looking ridiculous. Better to admit she is a Harvard elitist than to claim to be something she is provably not.

27 comments:

AndrewPrice said...

This is one of those things which just annoys me to no end. First, we shouldn't be grading people based on their ethnic background. That bull.

Secondly, isn't it amazing how it's always someone on the left who is trying to milk this BS to get ahead? And then they get caught and what do their fellow leftists do? They say it's not a big deal. So are these things like affirmative action really meant to help people or are they just political tools for leftists to exploit? The answer seems obvious to me.

Grrrr.

Tennessee Jed said...

Hawk - what a crock. She deserves a special place in history along with Soldad O'Brian in which the mere mention of their names evokes ridicule and laughter. Were this not Massachussetts and she non a flaming liberal from the 9th gate of Hades, this is exactly how she would be remembered.

T-Rav said...

Breitbart has an article up about this. Turns out, even Warren's 1/32 claim is, shall we say, extremely tenuous. Apparently it rests on a great-great-great-grandfather who was trying to marry a woman in Indian Territory and claimed his mother was Cherokee or something. So actually, it would be 1/64, but not even that, because no one's even sure the woman was Indian--Tennessee census records list her as white. So.

Of course, this is beside the point, which is that Warren is as much of an elitist WASP as you can get, and has no business claiming she knows what it's like to be a minority.

Anonymous said...

Andrew: These clowns seem to have a wealth of trial balloons to send up all the time. The find a leftist cause, use it until someone discovers it, wait to see the public reaction, then pull out their alternate plans: Admit, if it worked. Waffle if it's unclear. Deny, if it hurts. But the only thing that is always irrelevant is the truth.

BevfromNYC said...

It's the "high cheekbones" that get you every time. What was most interesting is the reaction from the Native American tribes. They weren't too happy about the 1/32 rule.

That being said, my greatx24 grandfather was Henry VII. Does that mean I can get in line for the British crown?

Anonymous said...

Tennessee: Are you suggesting that the People's Republic of Massachusetts may see things somewhat differently from normal people? I'd suggest that Warren is the last of the Mohicans, but that's about the only east coast tribe that she hasn't mentioned at one time or another.

Anonymous said...

T-Rav: I'm sure the Breitbart site is right. I used the 1/32 figure solely because it's the most Native American blood she could possibly claim, and that was highly dubious. But even at 1/32, calling herself an American Indian is simply ludicrous.

Anonymous said...

Bev: This is the same game the Democrats have been playing since Reconstruction. They used to use 1/16 black blood as a disqualifier for public participation in "white affairs," and now they use 1/32 Native American blood as a qualifier for office. They simply have no shame. It's part of why the first "post-racial" president is actually obsessed with race.

rlaWTX said...

my great-great grandmother was reputed to have been a "full-blood squaw". My great grandfather was somewhat embarrassed by this, so that's pretty much the extent of the family lore. I always thought that was kinda neat. I made the mistake of saying that line in quotes above when I was in college (under the 'neat, odd things about my family' category) and found out that squaw was a bad word. Anyway, if true, then I am 1/16 some tribe or another. I should let my cousin know to go look it up - maybe she can get some grant money out of it for vet school! Despite her being a blue-eyed blonde...

Anonymous said...

rlaWTX: With a last name like Hawk, I could claim a lot of Native American blood (as long as nobody bothered to check too closely). America is so diverse that ignoring ethnicity would be like wearing blinders. What made America great was that eventually it was just a matter of interest, neither qualification nor disqualification for public participation. The Democrats and academia revivified race and ethnic identity in order to divide Americans into voting blocs. This comes from the party with a president who claims none of that matters and we're all Americans without hyphens.

K said...

You can bet all the med/law schools are going to be getting a whole new crop of entrants looking for job and tuition perks.

Anonymous said...

K: And you can place a bet that if those numbers are grossly skewed, the administrations will deny that ethnicity had anything to do with their choices.

T-Rav said...

Practically everyone in the country's midsection could (and does) claim a Cherokee Indian as an ancestor. I certainly do--if you ever saw my grandfather, you'd know why. But unlike Warren, we don't claim to be Indians on that basis, because we're not. We're whites, it's obvious we're whites, and we know it would be silly to claim otherwise. I don't know why she felt the need to try and do so--unless 1) she couldn't hack it through her own merit, or 2) being identified as a lily-white oppressor was just too much for her to handle.

StanH said...

I mentioned on another blog that when Scott Brown debates her he should greet her with “how!” while pointing and laughing. The consternation from the PC crowd was swift, forgetting the stereotype that Warren laid out “high cheekbones,” etc. For members of Team Parasite this does not matter, their only concern is “what’s in it for me?”

Anonymous said...

T-Rav: Most people whose ancestors have been here for at least a few generations can find Native American blood in the family. Despite what the gay lobby would like the public to think, those mountain men, hunters and plainsmen were largely not constantly having sex with each other. There were prostitutes and there were Indian maidens. They generally tended to marry the Indian maidens when a baby came along. Nobody should be shocked by that, and nobody should claim to be a Native American because great-great-grandpa had an Indian wife.

As I mentioned in passing within the article, Warren attended a second-tier law school (Rutgers) and had plenty of serious competition for the professorial positions she sought. So she came up with "minority" and "Native American" knowing that despite all the protestations of the various administrations, that would give her a bump to offset her mediocre credentials. Also, once she was firmly ensconced in her ivory tower position, she dropped her minority gambit from her curriculum vitae.

Anonymous said...

Stan: As I've said before, liberals and the politically-correct have no sense of humor and no sense of proportion. The reaction to your comment was predictable as hell. Whitey is the only one you can make jokes about--everyone else is off-limits. BTW--Hilarious comment!

Joel Farnham said...

LawHawk,

This is one of those who-cares things that come up from time to time. Since she claimed it, how-ever tenuous, she should stand by her actions. This time it blows up in her face because she is NOT standing by her actions, like she knows she pushed something she shouldn't have and is a little ashamed of it.

Scott Brown better make use of this, although it looks like he doesn't really have to.

Anonymous said...

Joel: She put herself in an impossible position by lying in the first place. With the revelations, she is forced to respond. She can continue to lie, she can waffle, or she can 'fess up. None of those will help her. I'm enjoying watching her squirm. If she hadn't lied in the first place, she probably wouldn't have gotten the positions that led to her Senate run. Oh, what a tangled web . . . .

USArtguy said...

I was told by someone years ago that anyone can own land on a reservation who can prove they are at least 1/32 American Indian. I don't know if that's true, but if it meets some legal definition, it might be why she has made it a point, laughable as it is, to make the claim. Perhaps being 1/32 anything is legal grounds to make the claim of membership into any particular group entitling you to whatever benefits are available. Which would make me doubly qualified for whatever Warren is claiming... if I cared. While I appreciate that branch of my family tree, it's not much more than a curiosity-- as far as affecting my life. Besides, I have too many other short-comings in this PC world: middle aged, middle class, conservative, male, 15/16's not of color....

Anonymous said...

USArtguy: I don't know much about the rules for reservation ownership, though Ward Churchill made a 1/32 claim for similar purposes. He actually thought living on a reservation would be a dandy idea. Let's face it, Warren isn't planning on leaving the Harvard Yard (or DC if she's elected). It was all about gaining an unfair advantage. Churchill actually believes his own hype.

rlaWTX said...

yeah, that's what I want - a chunk of rez land... lol

now, if that's all that's required for school grants, we'll talk...

Individualist said...

Lawhawk

The premise of Warren claiming to be a minority professor seems ridiculous.

The only way to be a minority professor at Harvard is to be an outspoken conservative.

What gives....

Anonymous said...

rlaWTX: Simi Valley went from a sleepy suburb to one of the wealthiest per capita cities in Ventura County California. But we stole it from the Chumash Indians. Have I mentioned that I'm 1/32 Chumash and I want my land back?

Anonymous said...

Indi: Now THAT'S the true definition of a Harvard minority.

Anonymous said...

Well, I'm 1/4 serb, 1/4 Austrian, and 1/2 Irish, but I have some feeling that being Serbian isn't likely to get some sort of recognition, at least politically or on job applications, anyways.

Anonymous said...

obiwan: We'll test you. Do you speak 1/4 Austrian? Our judge is Barack Obama of Harvard.

Anonymous said...

Well, LawHawk, here's how your statement would sound in Austria, and similar in the Balkan states, for the German-speaking circles,

"Unser Richter ist Barack Obama von Harvard"

But I'll be honest, and just say that I like Spanish a whole lot more as a language than German.

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