Do you ever stop to wonder what kind of feigned outrage there would be on the right, if this were reversed, if it were Scott Brown claiming Native American heritage, and it were a Democratic challenger going after him for this, instead of addressing factual and substantive matters?
The right wing nuts are hypocrites, the kind that believe in things that are implausible, and without substance, driven by ideology. And no matter how much evidence is provided to the contrary of their conspiracy theories, they will not be persuaded because facts are not their friend, and because they wallow in an alternate comic book universe of fantasy and paranoid delusions.
The right no longer values reason, the right no longer values substance or fact; the right no longer values fairness or other moral and ethical values. They value - in practice - dog whistles for bigotry, fear mongering and hate.
How DARE Elizabeth Warren be a competent, accomplished, brilliant woman, challenging an older white male for power! If the right can't fault her legitimately, they believe it is not only acceptable, but absolutely necessary to make up a lie, and to tell it as often as possible.
Shame on them for their failed values, their lax morals, their lack of ethics.
From the STrib (by way of the wa po):
From 1960 to 1990, the number of Americans claiming to be American Indians more than tripled to 1.8 million, according to census figures. In the 2000 Census, which for the first time allowed people to mark more than one race, 4.1 million Americans said they were at least partly Native American.
In Oklahoma, where Warren is from, her story came as no surprise, said Amanda Clinton, spokeswoman for the Cherokee Nation.
"This is a very common claim," said Clinton, who noted that Cherokee citizens must be directly descended from tribal members listed on the Dawes Rolls between 1898 and 1914. Warren's family is not found there.
"However, we do not feel it is the tribe's place to second-guess someone's family tree," she said. "There is a big difference between citizenship and heritage."
And from the Atlantic:
None of this to say that a Cherokee citizen couldn't look like Warren. Though it confounds many people's expectations, the Cherokee Nation considers being Cherokee as much an ethnicity as anything racial, and given the tribe's centuries-long history of intermarriage there are many Cherokee citizens today who do not look stereotypically Native American. As well, "there are a lot of folks who are legitimately Cherokee who are not eligible for citizenship," said Krehbiel-Burton, because, for example, their ancestors lived in distant states or territories when the rolls were drawn up, or because they are direct descendants of people left off the rolls for other reasons.
Fractional Native American ancestry is quite hard to prove to the standards of the U.S. government, which in many ways acts as the ultimate "birther" in this regard. Percentage of ancestry or "blood quantum" -- the creepy and antique-sounding term used by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which certifies it for two of the three Cherokee tribes -- is recognized by the Bureau based on original documents (such as birth certificates, Census records, and death certificates) through something called a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood, or CDIB.
Warren would need to be certified by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as at least 1/16 Eastern Cherokee on a CDIB to be eligible to join the Eastern Cherokee. The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee has an even stricter enrollment cut-off: "a minimum blood quantum requirement of one quarter (1/4) degree Keetoowah Cherokee blood" documented via a CDIB plus a direct descent from someone on the Dawes Rolls. Tribal citizenship standards are set by the tribes themselves, and not the U.S. government.
... Should the genealogists be unable to find supporting documents, Warren could also quietly pursue familial DNA testing, which might confirm Native American ancestry, even if records of individual ancestors or their specific tribal affiliations have been lost to the mists of time. Her one-time Harvard University colleague Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has promoted such efforts as part of helping African Americans learn more about their mixed ancestry, hosting a series of shows on PBS featuring famous figures tracking down their forebears using genetics and genealogy. (He's also pointed out that many African Americans erroneously believe they have Native American ancestors, especially Cherokee ones, making it "the biggest myth in African-American genealogy.") DNA ancestry tests are not dispositive, and even a positive result would not be useful for tribal affiliation or CDIB purposes. But it would silence her critics, and -- more importantly -- it would help her learn whether what she had spent her life thinking she knew about herself and her family was true.
"Being Native American has been part of my story I guess since the day I was born," Warren told the Boston Herald in early May. "These are my family stories, I have lived in a family that has talked about Native American and talked about tribes since I was a little girl."
...T he best argument she's got in her defense is that, based on the public evidence so far, she doesn't appear to have used her claim of Native American ancestry to gain access to anything much more significant than a cookbook; in 1984 she contributed five recipes to the Pow Wow Chow cookbook published by the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, signing the items, "Elizabeth Warren -- Cherokee."
Warren, who graduated from the University of Houston in 1970 and got her law degree from Rutgers University in 1976, did not seek to take advantage of affirmative action policies during her education, according documents obtained by the Associated Press and The Boston Globe. On the application to Rutgers Law School she was asked, "Are you interested in applying for admission under the Program for Minority Group Students?'' "No," she replied.
While a teacher at the University of Texas, she listed herself as "white." But between 1986 and 1995, she listed herself as a minority in the Association of American Law Schools Directory of Faculty; the University of Pennsylvania in a 2005 "minority equity report" also listed her as one of the minority professors who had taught at its law school.
The head of the committee that brought Warren to Harvard Law School said talk of Native American ties was not a factor in recruiting her to the prestigious institution. Reported the Boston Herald in April in its first story on Warren's ancestry claim: "Harvard Law professor Charles Fried, a former U.S. Solicitor General who served under Ronald Reagan, sat on the appointing committee that recommended Warren for hire in 1995. He said he didn't recall her Native American heritage ever coming up during the hiring process.
"'It simply played no role in the appointments process. It was not mentioned and I didn't mention it to the faculty,' he said."
He repeated himself this week, telling the Herald: "In spite of conclusive evidence to the contrary, the story continues to circulate that Elizabeth Warren enjoyed some kind of affirmative action leg-up in her hiring as a full professor by the Harvard Law School. The innuendo is false."
"I can state categorically that the subject of her Native American ancestry never once was mentioned," he added.
That view was echoed by Law School Professor Laurence H. Tribe, who voted to tenure Warren and was also involved in recruiting her.
"Elizabeth Warren's heritage had absolutely no role in the decision to recruit her to Harvard Law School," he told the Crimson. "Our decision was entirely based on her extraordinary expertise and legendary teaching ability. This whole dispute is fabricated out of whole cloth and has no connection to reality."
And that's the second arena where an absence of evidence should have some weight. If there's no easily located evidence that Warren has Native American ancestry, there's also no evidence Warren used her family story to boost herself into a Harvard job.
A huge tell -- beyond the flat denials of two of the men who brought her to the school -- is that Warren's ancestry was not touted in 1995 in the Harvard Crimson as the Law School's first Native American hire, despite the ethnic studies movement's gathering force on the college's campus at the time and continued controversy over the lack of diversity at the law school (as highlighted at a protest involving Prof. Derrick Bell and law school student Barack Obama in 1991). The Crimson article on Warren was titled simply, "Woman Tenured at Law School."
"Liz Warren is a spectacular addition to our faculty," Law School Dean Robert Clark told the Crimson. "She is a leading scholar in the fields of bankruptcy and commercial law, and she is one of the rare legal academics to have devoted herself to a large-scale empirical research project of great relevance to legal policy making."
Compare that to the Crimson editorial that greeted Lani Guinier just three years later, which heralded her as "the first female African-American professor in the 181-year history of HLS." While this article also repeated the claim about Warren's ethnicity -- "Harvard Law School currently has only one tenured minority woman, Gottlieb Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren, who is Native American," the '98 piece said -- that information had so little penetrated the consciousness of legal circles that Guinier was quoted in the very same article saying, "Though I am the first woman of color to join the tenured faculty, I know that I will not be the last, and this is important to me." Dean Clark said he felt hiring her would "attract other top scholars of diverse backgrounds." He made no similar statement upon Warren's hire.
The right wing nuts are hypocrites, the kind that believe in things that are implausible, and without substance, driven by ideology. And no matter how much evidence is provided to the contrary of their conspiracy theories, they will not be persuaded because facts are not their friend, and because they wallow in an alternate comic book universe of fantasy and paranoid delusions.
The right no longer values reason, the right no longer values substance or fact; the right no longer values fairness or other moral and ethical values. They value - in practice - dog whistles for bigotry, fear mongering and hate.
How DARE Elizabeth Warren be a competent, accomplished, brilliant woman, challenging an older white male for power! If the right can't fault her legitimately, they believe it is not only acceptable, but absolutely necessary to make up a lie, and to tell it as often as possible.
Shame on them for their failed values, their lax morals, their lack of ethics.
From the STrib (by way of the wa po):
From 1960 to 1990, the number of Americans claiming to be American Indians more than tripled to 1.8 million, according to census figures. In the 2000 Census, which for the first time allowed people to mark more than one race, 4.1 million Americans said they were at least partly Native American.
In Oklahoma, where Warren is from, her story came as no surprise, said Amanda Clinton, spokeswoman for the Cherokee Nation.
"This is a very common claim," said Clinton, who noted that Cherokee citizens must be directly descended from tribal members listed on the Dawes Rolls between 1898 and 1914. Warren's family is not found there.
"However, we do not feel it is the tribe's place to second-guess someone's family tree," she said. "There is a big difference between citizenship and heritage."
And from the Atlantic:
None of this to say that a Cherokee citizen couldn't look like Warren. Though it confounds many people's expectations, the Cherokee Nation considers being Cherokee as much an ethnicity as anything racial, and given the tribe's centuries-long history of intermarriage there are many Cherokee citizens today who do not look stereotypically Native American. As well, "there are a lot of folks who are legitimately Cherokee who are not eligible for citizenship," said Krehbiel-Burton, because, for example, their ancestors lived in distant states or territories when the rolls were drawn up, or because they are direct descendants of people left off the rolls for other reasons.
Fractional Native American ancestry is quite hard to prove to the standards of the U.S. government, which in many ways acts as the ultimate "birther" in this regard. Percentage of ancestry or "blood quantum" -- the creepy and antique-sounding term used by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which certifies it for two of the three Cherokee tribes -- is recognized by the Bureau based on original documents (such as birth certificates, Census records, and death certificates) through something called a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood, or CDIB.
Warren would need to be certified by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as at least 1/16 Eastern Cherokee on a CDIB to be eligible to join the Eastern Cherokee. The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee has an even stricter enrollment cut-off: "a minimum blood quantum requirement of one quarter (1/4) degree Keetoowah Cherokee blood" documented via a CDIB plus a direct descent from someone on the Dawes Rolls. Tribal citizenship standards are set by the tribes themselves, and not the U.S. government.
... Should the genealogists be unable to find supporting documents, Warren could also quietly pursue familial DNA testing, which might confirm Native American ancestry, even if records of individual ancestors or their specific tribal affiliations have been lost to the mists of time. Her one-time Harvard University colleague Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has promoted such efforts as part of helping African Americans learn more about their mixed ancestry, hosting a series of shows on PBS featuring famous figures tracking down their forebears using genetics and genealogy. (He's also pointed out that many African Americans erroneously believe they have Native American ancestors, especially Cherokee ones, making it "the biggest myth in African-American genealogy.") DNA ancestry tests are not dispositive, and even a positive result would not be useful for tribal affiliation or CDIB purposes. But it would silence her critics, and -- more importantly -- it would help her learn whether what she had spent her life thinking she knew about herself and her family was true.
"Being Native American has been part of my story I guess since the day I was born," Warren told the Boston Herald in early May. "These are my family stories, I have lived in a family that has talked about Native American and talked about tribes since I was a little girl."
...T he best argument she's got in her defense is that, based on the public evidence so far, she doesn't appear to have used her claim of Native American ancestry to gain access to anything much more significant than a cookbook; in 1984 she contributed five recipes to the Pow Wow Chow cookbook published by the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, signing the items, "Elizabeth Warren -- Cherokee."
Warren, who graduated from the University of Houston in 1970 and got her law degree from Rutgers University in 1976, did not seek to take advantage of affirmative action policies during her education, according documents obtained by the Associated Press and The Boston Globe. On the application to Rutgers Law School she was asked, "Are you interested in applying for admission under the Program for Minority Group Students?'' "No," she replied.
While a teacher at the University of Texas, she listed herself as "white." But between 1986 and 1995, she listed herself as a minority in the Association of American Law Schools Directory of Faculty; the University of Pennsylvania in a 2005 "minority equity report" also listed her as one of the minority professors who had taught at its law school.
The head of the committee that brought Warren to Harvard Law School said talk of Native American ties was not a factor in recruiting her to the prestigious institution. Reported the Boston Herald in April in its first story on Warren's ancestry claim: "Harvard Law professor Charles Fried, a former U.S. Solicitor General who served under Ronald Reagan, sat on the appointing committee that recommended Warren for hire in 1995. He said he didn't recall her Native American heritage ever coming up during the hiring process.
"'It simply played no role in the appointments process. It was not mentioned and I didn't mention it to the faculty,' he said."
He repeated himself this week, telling the Herald: "In spite of conclusive evidence to the contrary, the story continues to circulate that Elizabeth Warren enjoyed some kind of affirmative action leg-up in her hiring as a full professor by the Harvard Law School. The innuendo is false."
"I can state categorically that the subject of her Native American ancestry never once was mentioned," he added.
That view was echoed by Law School Professor Laurence H. Tribe, who voted to tenure Warren and was also involved in recruiting her.
"Elizabeth Warren's heritage had absolutely no role in the decision to recruit her to Harvard Law School," he told the Crimson. "Our decision was entirely based on her extraordinary expertise and legendary teaching ability. This whole dispute is fabricated out of whole cloth and has no connection to reality."
And that's the second arena where an absence of evidence should have some weight. If there's no easily located evidence that Warren has Native American ancestry, there's also no evidence Warren used her family story to boost herself into a Harvard job.
A huge tell -- beyond the flat denials of two of the men who brought her to the school -- is that Warren's ancestry was not touted in 1995 in the Harvard Crimson as the Law School's first Native American hire, despite the ethnic studies movement's gathering force on the college's campus at the time and continued controversy over the lack of diversity at the law school (as highlighted at a protest involving Prof. Derrick Bell and law school student Barack Obama in 1991). The Crimson article on Warren was titled simply, "Woman Tenured at Law School."
"Liz Warren is a spectacular addition to our faculty," Law School Dean Robert Clark told the Crimson. "She is a leading scholar in the fields of bankruptcy and commercial law, and she is one of the rare legal academics to have devoted herself to a large-scale empirical research project of great relevance to legal policy making."
Compare that to the Crimson editorial that greeted Lani Guinier just three years later, which heralded her as "the first female African-American professor in the 181-year history of HLS." While this article also repeated the claim about Warren's ethnicity -- "Harvard Law School currently has only one tenured minority woman, Gottlieb Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren, who is Native American," the '98 piece said -- that information had so little penetrated the consciousness of legal circles that Guinier was quoted in the very same article saying, "Though I am the first woman of color to join the tenured faculty, I know that I will not be the last, and this is important to me." Dean Clark said he felt hiring her would "attract other top scholars of diverse backgrounds." He made no similar statement upon Warren's hire.
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