In Washington, it is often the response of politicians to allegations that get them into more trouble than the original allegations themselves. Harvard Professor and US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren appears to be reaffirming that rule as more information surfaced that casts serious questions about her veracity over the claim to being a Native American. The latest disclosure comes from the Boston Globe, a Democratic-leaning newspaper that has been criticized for downplaying the controversy in the past. I previously discussed how claiming to be a minority is a significant act for law professors due to reporting to the federal government, the ABA, and AALS. Warren has insisted that she was unaware that she was listed as a minority, but, as a law professor, I am skeptical how such listings can occur without a professor volunteering the information. Now, the Boston Globe is reporting that Harvard listed Warren for years as a minority in reports to the federal government. Obviously, this story has particular interest to law professors, but it is being played out in the Massachusetts senatorial race.
I do not share the view that anyone should be able to claim to be a minority, particularly when reporting responsibilities to the government and the ABA hold great importance for schools and academics. Warren is not a minority. She also does not meet that federal definition of a Native American.
Warren’s denial of knowledge of being viewed as a minority and a Cherokee has faced repeatedly contradiction including the recent disclosure by the New York Times of being claimed as a minority faculty member at her earlier law school, the University of Pennsylvania. There have also been smaller disclosures like her contributions to the “Pow Wow Cook Book” as a Cherokee woman.
The Globe reports on Warren’s pasts denial but reveals “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.” The school notes, as we previously discussed, such statistics are based on the reporting of the professors themselves as minorities. The newspaper states the new information “further questions about Warren’s statements that she was unaware Harvard was promoting her as Native American.”
Warren is refusing to respond to the new information and her campaign insists that she has already answered enough questions.
Alan Ray, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, was the official responsible during this period for reporting at Harvard. He is now president of Elmhurst College in Illinois and says that he did not list Warren unilaterally and never encouraged an professor to report themselves as a minority.
Warren was repeatedly identified as a minority Native American in various publications for the Harvard Crimson. As previously discussed, she was called Harvard Law’s “first woman of color” in a 1997 Fordham Law Review and in 1998, Harvard published a letter to the New York Times heralding the presence of a “Native American” on the faculty. Then again in 1998, the Crimson followed up on the New York Times publication and wrote “Harvard Law School currently has only one tenured minority woman, Gottlieb Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren, who is Native American.”
I have previously said how much I respect Warren as an academic and her intellect would be clearly be an asset in the U.S. Senate. However, I remained concerned over the denials of knowledge and the years of claims to be a minority. Whether such claims assisted her career or not, the reporting of minority hiring affects myriad of different issues and rankings. To count a minority member on a faculty, reduces pressure on the school to further diversify its ranks and elevates the status of the professor. Under any reasonable definition, Warren is not a minority and there is no documentation establishing that she is even 1/32 Cherokee. Even if she were 1/32 Cherokee, would we feel it was fine for someone to claim they are black or hispanic with 1/32 connection to that minority or asian? If so, law schools could claim a multifold increase in minorities. Clearly, we cannot have reporting data if anyone is given carte blanche in self-proclaiming themselves to be minorities.
While I do not question her pride in the family claim to have Indian blood (though tens of millions have such potential claims of a small presence of Indian blood in their families), there is a big difference between such pride and claiming to be a minority or Native American. I tend not to view these stories in partisan terms. Frankly, I am a critic of both parties. I believe that story does raise legitimate questions, particularly regarding the denials of knowledge. While I do not believe that this is the most important question in the campaign, I do believe it warrants further answers from Warren.
What do you think? Do you believe Warren should respond to these latest allegations in the Boston Globe and New York Times or is this completely irrelevant to judging Warren’s character and veracity?
Source: Boston Globe
Who’s afraid of Elizabeth Warren?
By Bernie Quigley – 05/25/12
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/campaign/229521-whos-afraid-of-elizabeth-warren
Excerpt:
“It was an observation on what it means to be an American,” I told the Boston Globe commentator who emailed about the blog (“Elizabeth Warren’s true American lineage,” The Hill’s Pundits Blog, 5/21/12). “My interest in Warren is only cultural as I cannot vote for her and would probably vote for Brown if I lived in Massachusetts. Most essential in my Hill essay were my comments on Emerson. His vision of America is elementary today: We are born free in the forest and should remain free from Europeanism. American Indians, in that regard — to Fenimore Cooper as well — are guides to us in this.”
Interesting that all the hollering came from men. Real pissed-off men. I can’t help think that the real moral issue here does run deep as blood. What’s really going on here? Elizabeth Warren “turned Injun”!
Coolidge, before he became president, was governor of Massachusetts and no one cared that he thought he was “part Indian,” as so many of the old north-country Yanks did. No one in Massachusetts cares about Elizabeth Warren in that as well. And in the last week Warren has risen from nine behind two months ago to go even with Scott Brown.
I place my bet right here that Warren will be five ahead next week, Native American or not. Because the psycho attack on Warren by the fascist fringe has now brought Brown into its web. Wanted or not, he now wears its cloak. And it won’t work in Massachusetts.
Native Americans are caucasian by definition. She didn’t do anything that was unethical, and potentially illegal. This is a bunch of nonsense about nothing.
Sorry, Matt Taibbi, not Matt Tabbi.
Warren is a rookie which is one of her better qualities and which I hope hope hope will continue, should she win, to inspire her to legislate with the needs of her constituents in mind more than those of the ubiquitous and persistent lobbyists or the people — Obama and co. — she may feel loyal to for carving out this opportunity.
Until it becomes absolutely clear that she manipulated minority status to further her career, this remains trivial (though possibly significant to her chances). Of course as Matt Tabbi said, only the trivial is allowed in discussing the upcoming elections and that rule is very much being honored.
anon,
“Intentionally defrauding the taxpayer, misrepresenting herself and stepping over minority students that could legitimately claim Indian Ancestry but were now left without one more position to have it usurped by yet another greedy caucasian would seem to be a much worse behavior: unethical, and potentially illegal.”
Where’s your proof that Elizabeth Warren did what you accuse her of doing. Do you work for Karl “Turd Blossom” Rove?
OOOHHHH! You speak of sweaty anxoiusness. Is this discussion getting you all hot and bothered?????
*****
Brooklin Bridge,
I agree with you that The Boston Globe has changed. I’m reminded of it every time I read the right-wing tripe written by Jeff Jacoby and John Sununu. I’d add that The Boston Globe has handled Scott Brown with kid gloves.
http://www.radiolab.org/2010/jun/28/be-careful-what-you-plan-for/
Where is the acorn?
Your remarks to the effect ‘Intentionally defrauding the taxpayer, misrepresenting herself and stepping over minority students’ are not just false but are misleading and argumentative.
If you want to argue that as a society we ought to change the way we identity ethnic background then I agree with you.
If you want to argue that Warren did something wrong under current standards then you are beginning to sound a bit wild eyed and breathless to me.
As a Mexican-American I had many opportunities to check Hispanic, Mexican-American, and gain access to scholarships or affirmative action programs.
But I knew my claim was tenuous, and more importantly, that I was not who these scholarships and programs were intended to help.
And I knew that even though I was merely a math student applying to an earth grounded college, not an elite law student, elite law grad, elite law professor applying to the lofty and godlike Harvard University.
If you are saying she didn’t do anything wrong under the current standards, I would say you have very low expectations of the intelligence and integrity of lawyers, and I would not leave you alone with my goat.
HTH
She has not handled it well. She doesn’t seem to recognize the power that trivial nonsense can have in our politics. Last Thursday, in an interview with Chris Matthews, who was persistent, but not in any way hostile, she kept trying to pivot back to the “real issues” in such an ungainly way that she looked not only like a rookie, but also like someone trying to kill mosquitoes with a baseball bat.
===========================================================How about putting dead birds through a turkey grinder in Alaska? Ask John McCain what he thinks of that.
Speaking of tribes, actually that’s all we ever speak of in politics, I wonder if Scott Brown’s great great great grand mater/pater was 1/32 Democrat.
Huh?
Posing nude was a perfectly legal activity then and now.
Intentionally defrauding the taxpayer, misrepresenting herself and stepping over minority students that could legitimately claim Indian Ancestry but were now left without one more position to have it usurped by yet another greedy caucasian would seem to be a much worse behavior: unethical, and potentially illegal.
Please don’t gloss over minor details in your sweaty anxiousness to have a woman elected.
Comparing these two activities is silly and apples and oranges.
I suspect that if Scott were to have made these phony claims, it too would be discussed about as loudly as Warren’s has been.
If you want to claim that the media (and especially the Rush Limbugs) would treat the nude posing differently, then yep, I bet you’re absolutely right on that. If she had posed identically to how Brown posed, than it’s clear her photos would have been dug up and photoshopped to be much worse and certainly XXX.
@anon
At this point I believe it is accurate to say that our society uses self identification for purposes of ethnic identification.
If that is true, and to the best of my understanding it is, then anything Warren did is also perfectly legal.
Your remarks to the effect ‘Intentionally defrauding the taxpayer, misrepresenting herself and stepping over minority students’ are not just false but are misleading and argumentative.
If you want to argue that as a society we ought to change the way we identity ethnic background then I agree with you.
If you want to argue that Warren did something wrong under current standards then you are beginning to sound a bit wild eyed and breathless to me.
Though professor Turley was careful to say, “Democratic-leaning”, rather than “liberal” or “progressive”, the Boston Globe is hardly a liberal newspaper and has been moving rightward ever since Tom Winship retired in 1985. Now, it’s basically like the NYT, (who owns the Globe), a right wing rag with a smattering of liberal and pseudo liberal holdouts.
Someone left the following comment at Charles Pierce’s article:
Thought experiment – take two stories:
A) Scott Brown once posed nude in a national magazine.
B) Elizabeth Warren claims 1/32 Cherokee ancestry.
Think about the relative importance these stories were given in the media, and how relevant they are to either person’s ability as a Senator.
OK, now think about what would happen if there was a simple change:
A) Scott Brown claims 1/32 Cherokee ancestry.
B) Elizabeth Warren once posed nude in a national magazine.
What does this tell you about the media, people in general, and how you should treat the information you see in the media?
@Elaine M.
Did you just say that Scott Brown is a sex worker?
The Indian Wars and Elizabeth Warren’s Problem
By Charles P. Pierce
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/elizabeth-warren-indian-background-9035008
Excerpt:
Anyway, that all came back to mind this week as I watched the nothingburger about Elizabeth Warren and her purported Cherokee ancestry become a story we all likely will have to confront for the balance of the campaign, amazing as that may seem to be. (The Boston Herald, banging its little tin drum for all it’s worth, today led the paper with a story that said it’s “probably too late” for the state’s Democrats to abandon Warren over this “scandal.” Yes, because, given the alternative, in a race that’s still a toss-up, the Democrats should abandon a woman with a huge campaign war chest and a national profile in order to turn to some alderman from Topsfield. Tabloid, please!) To be entirely fair, Cardinal Douthat was remarkably sensible about the whole affair over the weekend.
This really does seem to be one of those cases in which romantic family myth overtook cold genealogical fact, even though I have yet to meet anyone from Oklahoma who didn’t claim some sort of Native American ancestry. It is not all that dissimilar to what happened to Marco Rubio when it was revealed that his parents hadn’t fled Cuba to escape Castro, the more romantic alternative, but were merely perfectly acceptable economic refugees. I have no doubt that Rubio heard the folks talking about fleeing Castro. I have no doubt that Warren heard her folks talking about their Native American ancestors. I have no doubt that both of them believed every word of what they’ve heard.
There are differences, of course. The first is that Rubio made the fact that his parents were political exiles an important part of his campaign biography while, as near as anyone can tell, the only thing Warren did herself as regarding her alleged Native American background was to mention it from time to time, and contribute a recipe to a Cherokee cookbook. The other difference is that Rubio’s barbered background never became a “scandal” because the infrastructure is not there to make it one. That is not the case with Warren, and there’s more than a little evidence that her campaign is just now coming to realize what’s going on.
She has not handled it well. She doesn’t seem to recognize the power that trivial nonsense can have in our politics. Last Thursday, in an interview with Chris Matthews, who was persistent, but not in any way hostile, she kept trying to pivot back to the “real issues” in such an ungainly way that she looked not only like a rookie, but also like someone trying to kill mosquitoes with a baseball bat. The other thing she and her campaign doesn’t seem to understand is that this is not a story about a fudged resume. This is a story about affirmative action. Red Like Me. Or Squaw Lady.
The Herald — and the people on whose behalf the newspaper is pursuing its “scandal” — has been very clever in implying that Warren somehow benefitted personally from her having been listed as a minority at the various places at which she has worked. (Douthat does a good job in illustrating that, whatever advantages those institutions may have gained by listing Warren as a minority hire, she never referred to herself that way and, therefore, gained no advantages thereby.) To the readership that the Herald has carefully cultivated in the nearly 30 years since it was sold to an Australian tits-and-bum merchant who later developed a lucrative second career as a phone-hacker, “affirmative action” is a big red flashing light meaning that the brown people — or, in this case, the red people — are coming to steal all your money and take all your jobs, for which they are obviously not qualified:
“No kidding, my uncle was on a road crew in Middlesex County, and he got laid off ’cause they had to hire one of them.”
In making affirmative action a barely buried subtext in this story, the people pushing it have found a way to devalue Warren’s impeccable academic record while, at the same time, sowing doubts about both her “character” and her abilities as a political candidate. Everybody who reads the Herald knows what an “affirmative action hire” means, nudge-nudge, wink-wink. It does no good for Warren to reply that she just wants to get back to “the real issues,” just as it does no good for her to point out that she is as much a Cherokee as Scott ($840K a year) Brown is a suburban Daddy with a truck and a barn coat. There is something grim and nasty at work here that she cannot be too nice to see. And there is something grim and nasty at work here that local Democrats ought to recognize before they start sniping at her, and something national Democrats ought to recognize as a force to be defeated. Yeah, right.
As a Mexican-American, I know I could have benefited from many minority scholarships and outreach programs….
I am a Mexican-American, I mean, my Ashkenazi Dad was born in Mexico when the US had closed its borders to Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, so that makes me Mexican-American, right?
(I am curious if I can claim Mexican citizenship, but I suspect that when my father naturalized he probably had to revoke any Mexican citizenship he had claims to. Still, it would be nice to be able to own property in Mexico.)
“However, I don’t think a systemic error is the proper grounds for evaluating Warren’s fitness for office either.” -Gene H.
Agreed. I’d still like to see Warren in public office.
Has anyone found proof that Warren used minority status to get a position at any college/university? Are we to consider her to be guilty until proven innocent?
From the Boston Globe article:
“In recent weeks, Warren has repeatedly said that her race was not a factor in her hiring at Harvard or elsewhere, a point that several colleagues and supervisors at the schools have publicly supported. There is nothing in the federally required documents that contradicts those statements.”
*****
Another excerpt from the Boston Globe article:
“Warren, who has been dogged with questions about her ancestry since late April…”
She has been dogged by Howie Carr, The Boston Herald–a right-wing rag–Scott Brown and people who work for his campaign, operatives for Karl Rove.
I live in Massachusetts. Last year, Karl Rove’s group began smearing Warren with political ads filled with lies.
*****
Professor Turley wrote: “The latest disclosure comes from the Boston Globe, a Democratic-leaning newspaper that has been criticized for downplaying the controversy in the past.”
Gee, I wonder who criticized The Boston Globe. Don’t know why it was criticized, though, because the paper has published a number of articles on the subject.
In the state of Virginia it’s almost impossible to even prove you’re Native American due to the racist way birth records were recorded for decades: you could only be listed as ‘white’ or ‘black’. Many actual almost full blooded Natives can’t even prove their lineage in some of the oldest known tribes in this country because they literally didn’t exist within the records, even though they are legitimate Native Americans.
Virginia is not the only place this happened, nor would it be the only place someone recorded records and people as being other than what they are.
Perhaps the reason this can’t be verified to the satisfaction of some is that the records COULDN’T exist for these same reasons.
bfm,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordian_Knot
How do you untie the Gordian Knot? Alexander did it with an axe, because he didn’t know how to do it anyway else. I trust Elizabeth Warren.
I knew a Sioux Indian when I was in the Navy. We got into a fight at a bar in South San Francisco. Burris got me around the neck and pulled me out of the bar. We had knives. I said, what did you do that for? Burris said, because the bastard was going to kill you. The other guy had a revolver. Not making this up. Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight.
I said what are you going to do when you get back to the reservation? Burris said, I don’t know. I wasn’t an officer, I was E-5 enlisted. Burris is from South Dakota. Haven’t heard from him since.
@Matt
You ought to look him up. Friends that will pull you out of a bar and save your life are to be cherished.
Despite the fact that I hold Warren in high esteem I am not sure we could count on her to pull us out of a bar.
A whole series of one liners follow after that. But this is a serious political blog so I will just leave it.
My last question is…Who it the arbitrator of what percentage makes a person a member of a certain group?
Mark me down for what mespo said.
However, I don’t think a systemic error is the proper grounds for evaluating Warren’s fitness for office either.