Democratic Senatorial candidate Liz Warren’s latest excuse for claiming minority status is so risibly absurd, the mind boggles trying to imagine the ones she rejected:
10. I told Harvard I drove a Jeep Cherokee and somehow they got confused.
9. Seriously, would a person who created much of the intellectual foundation for Occupy Wall Street lie about being 1/32 Cherokee?
8. In my impressionable youth, I was brainwashed by Cher’s megahit Half Breed.
7. I'm Red, Scott's Brown. What's the problem?
6. People who doubt my Native-American heritage are the same evil conservatives who question President Obama’s divinity.
5. Ward Churchill swore I looked Cherokee-ish.
4. Cherokees are Native-Americans. Native-Americans fertilize crops with fish. Herring are fish. My maiden name is Herring. Somehow those facts got all mixed up in my young mind.
3. You’d believe me if I were a man.
2. As a child in Oklahoma, I used to play lacrosse, a Native-American game. One day, I suffered a concussion and woke up thinking I was Princess Moonbat of the Cherokee Nation.
1. I never thought I’d get caught.
35 comments:
I tend to believe Elizabeth Warren's claim that she has Indian ancestry. Howcum? Elizabeth Warren is an Okie, and Oklahoma was once Indian Nation. My mother was an Okie. Her two brothers married women that were 1/8 Indian, so I have cousins that are 1/16 Indian. My cousin who lives in Oklahoma has a wife who also has Indian ancestry. None of my relatives with Indian ancestry ever played the affirmative action card, nor have they ever gotten any any res dollars.
What use Elizabeth Warren made or didn't make of her Indian ancestry in advancing her career is another issue.
I don't think the issue is her "claim that she has Indian ancestry." The issue is whether she is American Indian sufficient to qualify as advancing campus diversity. And the answer clearly is no for several reasons.
To be recognized as a Native American, one has to be vetted, which requires being on the Dawes Rolls (which Warren is not). Also, Warren dropped her claim (in the Association of American Law Schools desk books) once her career was established sufficiently--suggesting that she, herself, either wasn't convinced or (as you say) was using her supposed Cherokee background to move up the greasy pole, to be discarded once arriving at the top.
In Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003), the Supreme Court upheld racial preferences in law school admissions because of the compelling need to promote "diversity." Should a 1/32nd slice be counted, everyone -- potentially -- is diverse, thus making nonsense of Justice O'Connor's (questionable) rationale. As Mark Steyn wrote:
"Just in case you’re having difficulty keeping up with all these Composite Americans, George Zimmerman, the son of a Peruvian mestiza, is the embodiment of endemic white racism and the reincarnation of Bull Connor, but Elizabeth Warren, the great-great-great-granddaughter of someone who might possibly have been listed as Cherokee on an application for a marriage license, is a heartwarming testimony to how minorities are shattering the glass ceiling in Harvard Yard. George Zimmerman, redneck; Elizabeth Warren, redskin. Under the Third Reich’s Nuremberg Laws, Ms. Warren would have been classified as Aryan and Mr. Zimmerman as non-Aryan. Now it’s the other way round. Progress!"
Civil rights lawyers: Obama’s campaign office may violate law due to lack of diversity
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/05/06/obama-campaign-office-staff-lacks-racial-diversity-may-violate-civil-rights-law/#ixzz1uDD8LDex
WashPost Promotes 'Liberal Hero' Elizabeth Warren on Page One, Buries Indian Gaffes Deep Inside
Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2012/05/07/washpost-promotes-liberal-hero-elizabeth-warren-page-one-buries-indian-g#ixzz1uDWc2Ph5
Carl:
I don't think the issue is her "claim that she has Indian ancestry." The issue is whether she is American Indian sufficient to qualify as advancing campus diversity. And the answer clearly is no for several reasons.
Your ten jokes- which admittedly are funny- are insinuating or EXPLICITLY STATING that Elizabeth Warren lied about her Indian ancestry. THAT is what I was responding to.
Recall how I finished my comment:
What use Elizabeth Warren made or didn't make of her Indian ancestry in advancing her career is another issue.
Which made your ensuing paragraphs superfluous, as you were preaching to the choir.
Gringo,
You wrote, "Your ten jokes- which admittedly are funny- are insinuating or EXPLICITLY STATING that Elizabeth Warren lied about her Indian ancestry. THAT is what I was responding to."
The first sentence, which sets up the Top 10 List, says, "... Liz Warren’s latest excuse for claiming minority status is so risibly absurd, the mind boggles trying to imagine the ones she rejected:"
So this post is clearly about how silly her excuse is for enrolling as a minority in law school directories.
Sure, parts of the list question whether or not she's 1/32 Cherokee -- but so what. She hasn't proved that she is.
If Liz Warren claimed minority status and possibly (notice how I used the word possibly) got a leg up on another candidate, maybe even a more deserving woman who's 1/8 Navajo, she should have more evidence than her Pepaw's high cheek bones. And colleges should demand more proof than a check inside a box, minority hiring practices notwithstanding.
One more thing. Let me see if I got this right. You believe Liz Warren has Indian ancestry because Oklahoma was once an Indian Nation; your mother was an Okie; her two brothers married women that were 1/8 Indian; your cousin who lives in Oklahoma also has Indian ancestry.
Your reasoning sounds remarkably like excuse #4.
Gringo: Let's stipulate Warren's 1/32nd Cherokee ancestry, like that of many from Oklahoma. I (honestly) have no trouble believing, nor disrespect for, a Cherokee connection.
One issue is the she (perhaps unlike your relatives and wife) cannot point to an ancestor on the Dawes Rolls. So her claim to ancestry shouldn't have given her preferential treatment in hiring for faculty diversity.
Another is that her Cherokee and Okie identities gained her an an advantage in hiring. Despite growing up in a three-car family (one of which was an MG sports car), and rising to the top 1 percent of earners (irony!). As Victor Davis Hanson says: "The real story is not that the multimillionaire liberal (and one-percenter) Warren fabricated a Cherokee identity for over a decade (to the delight of her quota-thirsty universities), but rather the notion that if a pink blond at Harvard can get away with faking a career-enhancing minority identity, then anyone, anywhere, can--or rather often has."
We seem to have bypassed Martin Luther King's dream of a day when men would be judged on the content of their character.
Carl:
One issue is the she (perhaps unlike your relatives and wife) cannot point to an ancestor on the Dawes Rolls. So her claim to ancestry shouldn't have given her preferential treatment in hiring for faculty diversity.
You apparently didn't bother to read my final sentence:
Which made your ensuing paragraphs superfluous, as you were preaching to the choir.
While the jokes were funny, most of them- if not all- were a distraction from the main point about Elizabeth Warren: her apparently gaming the system with some affirmative action action. If the AA system can be so easily gamed, which it can,it is corrupt and should be dismantled.
From my point of view, even if Elizabeth Warren had an ancestor on the Dawes rolls, she shouldn't have been given any affirmative action action. So I wonder why you even bother to bring up the Dawes rolls in the way you did.
Warren:
If Liz Warren claimed minority status and possibly (notice how I used the word possibly) got a leg up on another candidate, maybe even a more deserving woman who's 1/8 Navajo, she should have more evidence than her Pepaw's high cheek bones. And colleges should demand more proof than a check inside a box, minority hiring practices notwithstanding.
When you say "she should have," it appears that you accept the legitimacy of the AA system. I do not. My aunts with 1/8 Indian ancestry had successful careers without recourse to AA, at a time when most women were solely homemakers. One aunt, who had only a high school diploma, began as a secretary and ended up owning her own business in a field dominated by men with college degrees. She had clients all over the country. She didn't need any AA action to succeed.
One more thing. Let me see if I got this right. You believe Liz Warren has Indian ancestry because Oklahoma was once an Indian Nation; your mother was an Okie; her two brothers married women that were 1/8 Indian; your cousin who lives in Oklahoma also has Indian ancestry. [his wife,also.] Your reasoning sounds remarkably like excuse #4.
Since you apparently need to have more precise statements, I have written the following.
Based on my experience with visiting and working in Oklahoma, including knowing my relatives with Indian ancestry, I would conclude that genes indicating Indian ancestry are widely dispersed in the Oklahoma gene pool. Suppose that some blonde Okie claims that she has 1/32 Indian ancestry. Without my having recourse to checks which would validate such a claim, such as a DNA test or copious independent genealogical research, my judgment call is that such a claim is plausible.
Parse that.
I am not going to bother to reply to the jokes part of your comment. Hay respuesta, pero no vale la pena. No hay tiempo.
Ciao.
Harvard Native American program: Warren never participated in events
ACE OF SPADES: Fauxcahontas Warren's Family Lore Is In Heap Big Trouble
William A. Jacobson at LEGAL INSURRECTION: Cruel irony in Elizabeth Warren's Cherokee saga
Throughout her career and political campaign, Elizabeth Warren has found victims everywhere she looked, including when she looked in the mirror and saw an alleged descendant of one of the most historically victimized groups, Native Americans.
In what may be the ultimate and cruelest irony, not only is it unlikely that Elizabeth Warren’s great-great-great grandmother was Cherokee, it turns out that Warren’s great-great-great grandfather was a member of a militia unit which participated in the round-up of the Cherokees in the prelude to the Trail of Tears ...
Michael Barone: Comedic Counting by Race: Elizabeth Warren is one-eighth as Indian as George Zimmerman is black
Roy: Anyone else enjoying reading the counting of coup?
Elizabeth Warren brushes off ‘Trail of Tears’ report
Ann Coulter: Elizabeth Warren dances with lies
"Family lore is not proof. Proof is contemporary documentation, produced under penalty of perjury, such as a census record. My mother told me she found me under a rock, but I don't put that on job applications."
Best of the Web Today columnist James Taranto asks whether Elizabeth Warren's claim of Native American heritage helped her get a professorship.
A second law school, the University of Pennsylvania, has touted Elizabeth Warren as a minority faculty member in an official school publication, according to an online document obtained by the Boston Globe
The University of Pennsylvania, where Warren taught at the law school from 1987 through 1995, listed her as a minority in a “Minority Equity Report” posted on its website. The report, published in 2005, well after her departure, included her as the winner of a faculty award in 1994. Her name was highlighted in bold, the designation used for minorities in the report.
A spokesman for the law school did not immediately return a phone message today.
The reference offers another piece of evidence that Warren was identified as a Native American as part of her professional career. Warren has said she was unaware that Harvard University, her current employer, had described her as a Native American when it was under fire for a lack of diversity on its law school faculty.
Harvard apparently touted Elizabeth Warren’s status as a Native American in the New York Times
Warren's Cherokee Claim Based on Family Newsletter; No Marriage License Application to Be Found
Genealogist for Elizabeth Warren 1/32 Cherokee claim goes silent, source document shown false
Harvard EEOC Report Listed Warren as Native American in 1999
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/299808/elizabeth-warren-has-used-shoddy-evidence-alex-brill
Oops.
Here is the title to the above link:
Elizabeth Warren Has Used Shoddy Evidence Before
Okay, one more try:
Elizabeth Warren Has Used Shoddy Evidence Before
Amateur Genealogist Who Backed '1/32 Cherokee' Warren Now Admits Mistake
Lynda Smith, the amateur genealogist who unknowingly found herself at the root of the false “Elizabeth Warren is 1/32 Cherokee” meme introduced to the media by “noted” genealogist Chris Child of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, acknowledged in an email to me this past Saturday, May 12, that her statement in a March 2006 family newsletter upon which Mr. Child based his claim of Ms. Warren’s Cherokee ancestry was made with no supporting documentation. It was, in fact, an honest mistake that Ms. Smith now acknowledges is entirely without foundation.
Boston Globe Buries Correction of Elizabeth Warren 1/32 Cherokee Claim
Fordham piece called Warren Harvard Law's 'first woman of color'
Legal Insurrection: Cherokee Genealogist to Elizabeth Warren -- Tell the Truth
... But now Ms. Barnes is weighing in with A Letter to Elizabeth Warren:
I am writing this letter in the hope it will help end the current situation you have found yourself in. It seems you are being ripped apart in the media because of your claim of Cherokee ancestry and you don’t like it. According to a recent article in the Boston Globe, you believe your opponent is “creating a distraction” by “ridiculously” attacking you “with questions that have already been answered.” It seems you would like the “attacks” against your claims of Cherokee ancestry to stop so I thought I would offer some advice on how to make it stop.
Tell the truth….
While you cling to a family story and the inaccurate report that ONE document was found that supports your claim, we real Cherokees understand that those things mean nothing. You see, we Cherokees have lots and lots and lots of documentation supporting our claims of our ancestry. Our Cherokee ancestors are found on every roll of the Cherokee Nation (30+ rolls!) dating back to before the removal and in all sorts of other documentation, including but not limited to claims against the US government for lost property; the Moravian missionary records; ration lists before and after the forced removal, etc…yet your ancestors are found in NONE of those records.
But, your ancestors are found in plenty of historical records, and every time, they are found living as white people among other white people. Never are your ancestors ever found living among the Cherokees. Never, never, never, never…….yet you claim they were Cherokee….
So, Ms. Warren, you see, it is not just your opponent who has questions. We Cherokees have questions too and those questions have yet to be answered by you. You see, for us Cherokees, this is not political. This is about the truth.
You have claimed something you had no right to claim — our history and our heritage and our identity. Those things belong to us, and us alone. These are not things we choose to embrace when they benefit us and then cast aside when we no longer need them, but that is what you seem to have done by “checking a box” for several years and then no longer “checking” it more recently, when apparently you no longer needed it.
FOOTNOTE TO THE LETTER:
Several people who are experienced researchers in Cherokee genealogy have been working together exploring Elizabeth Warren’s ancestry. They have uncovered many documents that, combined, paint a very clear picture that Warren descends from white people who had no connection whatsoever to the Cherokee Nation. These documents will be posted soon.
Did they have cheek implants when Elizabeth Warren's Pepaw was alive?
Just wondering.
It looks like all Democrats are Native-American. We just have to take their word on it.
Like Warren, Obama Claims Cherokee Ancestry--But Offers No Proof
This from Bernie Quigley over at The Hill. Mr. Quigley appears to be serious.
Elizabeth Warren’s True American Lineage
... So Warren's claim to be "part Indian" is correct in mythical terms. Every old-school white Oklahoman is in this regard even if this in nominally not true. But it is not a lie to want to be Indian and to imagine your ancestors were. It is to be free of Europeanism. Emerson saw the laggard Europeanism within the Yankee mind as a curse of the unformed American, living half in shadow. It would bring temptation unnatural to us raised free in the forest; fascism, as in Italy, Spain and German, and the perennial virus of French nihilism.
Warren in that regard brings a fresh, classical Americanism from the heartland back to us in Boston where we still have tendencies. The James brothers, both William and Henry, would appreciate it. Henry in particular, in The Bostonians, could only find one worthy character up here, the country cousin Basil Ransom, a lawyer visiting from Mississippi. We are lucky to have Warren among us. She adds stock and substance.
I hope Mitt Romney remembers this and incorporates Indian blessings and ritual in his inaugural ceremonies as Canadians do and as they did in those terrific Winter Olympics in Salt Lake in 2002. And I hope Elizabeth Warren doesn't back down on this, because wanting to be Indian, like Hawkeye, makes us in a deeper sense fully American.
From PowerLine:
Winston Churchill, Harvard Minority
I had somehow forgotten that Winston Churchill’s grandmother was one-quarter Iroquois indian, which makes Winston (if I’ve done my genealogical math correctly) one-sixteenth native American–twice as much as Elizabeth Warren supposedly is. Let’s see the diversity-mongers explain this away.
Roosevelt commented to Churchill during one of WSC’s wartime visits, “You know, Winston, my Dutch ancestors were among the very first settlers in what was then called Nieuw Amsterdam.” Churchill answered: “But, Franklin, it was my ancestors, the American Indians, who greeted them.”
Maybe now Obama will feel comfortable putting the Churchill bust back in the Oval Office.
This from Mary Carmichael at the Boston Globe:
Filings add to questions on Warren’s ethnic claims
Elizabeth Warren has not proven she has a Native American ancestor, instead saying she based her belief on family lore.
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.
The Warren campaign declined Thursday to answer the Globe’s specific questions about the documents. In a statement, Warren’s spokeswoman, Alethea Harney, said that “over the past month Elizabeth has answered countless questions openly while the people who recruited her have made it clear it was because of her extraordinary skill as a teacher and a groundbreaking scholar.’’ ...
AP Predictably Leaves Harvard's Violation of Federal Guidelines Out of Coverage of Liz Warren's Claimed Indian Heritage
... According to both Harvard officials and federal guidelines, those statistics (on employees' ethnicity) 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 Harvard document defines Native American as "a person having origins in any of the original peoples of North America and who maintains cultural identification through tribal affiliation or community recognition." It notes that this definition is consistent with federal regulations.
It is not a definition Warren appears to fit. She has not proven she has a Native American ancestor, instead saying she based her belief on family lore, and she has no official tribal affiliation. The current executive director of Harvard’s Native American program has said she has no memory of Warren participating in any of its activities. ...
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