I’m just going to go ahead here and extend the metaphor into actual rumor… just so we can get that much sooner to brass tacks:
Elizabeth Warren was born on a Cherokee reservation the daughter of a full blood Cherokee warrior who’s also a Socialist (His Cherokee name translates to “Dances with Marx.”) Therefore she’s neither a citizen nor a true democrat.
There. It’s been said.
All seriousness aside: does it seem familiar to anyone that issues of provenance are at the heart of the attack here? Barack Obama, obviously not white, is questioned on issues of geneology right up until last year. Now Elizabeth Warren is also under scrutiny for her ancestry… ancestry that can, similarly, prove that she may not be sufficiently aryan: that she’s not the completely, white bread, Oklahoma girl she’s presenting herself as, and has always presented herself as…
Now the Zen Masters amongst us might harumph and gallump about how this has nothing whatsoever to do with racism but merely with a laughably unfair attempt to gain benefit from a long distant relationship. Tell that to the Mayflawer Society, or the DAR… Honestly, does anyone think that she would face the same scrutiny, for example, if she gained some advantage, say a scholarship or recognition or networking help, because some ancestor once journeyed on the Mayflower, or fought in the Revolutionary War…? A lineage of equal or greater distance than that which she may, or may not, have claimed here.
Don’t fool yourselves, the ‘win’ for team SB here is to put forth the notion that she’s not completely white.
Yes, if she had gained prestige or advancement from claiming to be descendent of the Mayflower or Revolution, and it turned out she wasn’t, it’d be a major question to her credibility. And she didn’t claim to be a descendent of a Native American, she was listed AS a Native American. But then you deranged libs cite the One Drop rule as if it was a valid rule you still believe in, and now you want to go even further into derangement land with this latest piece of insanity. Sorry but she’s completely white, and no one would feel any differently about her for having part Cherokee-heritage, except liberals apparently.
… that a credible liberal (people treated rejected as cranks by the majority of liberals don’t count) that “cite the One Drop rule as if it was a valid rule [we] still believe in”.
Until you can cite, I call bullshit.
Lynne is sure that 1/32nd makes one a Native American.
… as an exemplar of what you call ‘you’? Fail.
Link goes to a ‘Christopher’ comment.
Here is the correct link to the exchange where Lynne (your wife?) “cite[s] the One Drop rule as if it was a valid rule [we] still believe in”. She is clearly claiming that 1/32 makes one a Native American, which is citing the “one-drop” rule like they did 75 years ago, saying that just 1/32 means she is Native American, not white. Sorry, she’s white.
No one is disputing or disrespecting or making an issue of her heritage, it’s about who she is now and who she was claiming to be. She was claiming to BE a minority herself, not just claiming to have Native American heritage, which is citing the One Drop rule. Even if we grant that people identify (and are identified) “heritage”-wise without being “full-blooded,” and race is not a scientific thing anyhow, did Warren ever actually live and identify as a Native American? Wait, I bet that’s it – she probably did. But that’s just pretentious college professor stuff.
… moving where a 1 drop rule = 1/32, I might call myself whatever 1/32nd I am, but that’s my business. As to what that means legally and professionally?, let the lawyers and bosses decide.
… claimed to be more than she is. She has Amerindian heritage. In Oklahoma that probably means something. Supposedly I have some Amerindian blood somewhere but I’ve never bothered to look for it.
*shrug* I imagine it’s not all that rare.
And the fact is, cutseypie, that 1/32 (and she is likely more) IS enough to claim by the manner in which these things are counted in this country.
All Warren EVER did was be proud of her ancestors. She checked a box that bespoke of such. HOW IS THIS WRONG??
I’m French Canadian, is it OK that I state that, or am I going to get in trouble for the bit of First Peoples Canadian blood I have?
Get off it already. You are not helping your guy! (Then again, you never do, you just dig deeper holes for them every time you post. So actually, please KEEP posting!)
“One drop rule”? Will we now emulate South Africa’s apartheid laws? We have what amount to “pass” laws for Hispanics in Arizona — with the enthusiastic support of the Arizona GOP. We have the GOP coordinating a national campaign of “voter ID” laws that emulate the many creative ways that southern racists disenfranchised minorities during the civil rights era.
How far can we go down this road without invoking Godwin’s law?
This non-story, like the birther non-story, exists SOLELY for the racists among us.
I was pointing that out to petr and Lynne, who seemed to think it was still the way to think about racial heritage. It isn’t. Warren is not a Cherokee, she is a white woman who claims she is a minority.
I don’t think that “claims she is a minority” is established, or nearly so.
Harvard claimed she was. Harvard got that information somehow, and we don’t know how. If the only place it was ever used was in Harvard’s self-promotional material, then who gives two shaving cream cans?
Even if she would have been hired without the minority status, by puffing up their diversity statistics with her, a white woman, they allow the school to pat itself on the back and hire more white people instead of looking for a minority professor.
http://volokh.com/2012/04/28/elizabeth-warren-herself-claimed-minority-status/
Dude, you are so frigging wrong.
I was stating that it has been PROVEN she has at LEAST 1/32 native blood. This goes against the whole “she has no native blood! She’s being dishonest!” meme that the Brownshirts wanted to go with at first. It’s so embarrassing to be a Brown supporter, isn’t it?
…. kinda wisht I’d thought of that…
I thought it was a pretty obvious one. 😉
Not to invoke Godwin or anything. But…satire[sarcasm] is protected speech, right? 🙂
If it were 1/64 would it make a difference?
So… it’s ok to be 1/32 (or, more likely at this remove, 1/64 or even 1/128) of a Mayflower tourist if, in fact, provenance can be established?? However distant the lineage, as long as it’s there, it’s OK to benefit, in whatever way, from that heritage?? Is that what you are saying?
Just so we’re clear: the DAR and The Mayflower Society can confer benefits unto an individual, or family, no matter the scantness of lineage, just as long as it can be proven. Right?
OK. I’ll buy that. But if I buy that, then the smallest fraction of Cherokee blood, no matter how distant, nor how presently mingled, can claim whatever benefits to which such blood is entitled…. Unless, of course, you want to argue that there is something inherently superior about DNA that was transported on the Mayflower and thus, by implication, there is something inherently inferior about Cherokee DNA…
Your move. Try not to get cute. And try not to hurt yourself.
I tried to explain that there is a difference between claiming to be a descendent and claiming to BE. People in the Mayflower Society don’t claim to have come over in the Mayflower themselves.
It’s not about establishing proof, who cares? It shouldn’t be important to anyone or to any program who someone’s great-great-grandmother was, or where all their ancestors came from. There is no need to prove any lineage, we can take their word and usually don’t need their word. People shouldn’t identify, in the present, as a member of a minority group that no one in their family has been identified as for 100 years and all of their great-great-grandparents identified as white and took full advantage of white privilege, but now she is a Cherokee Indian and makes for a diverse faculty?
… I quite think you’ve literally thought yourself into a pretzel. Honestly… the above makes NO sense.
She can claim to be a descendent, no one is upset with her casually mentioning that she has some distant grandmother who was Cherokee, that’s cool. We don’t need proof, it’s just a matter of cocktail party conversation.
But when she claims she is Native American herself, and lists her ethnicity as Native American, that is very different from claiming to have some distant link, like the DAR and Mayflower people obviously are claiming. None of them are claiming to have come on the Mayflower themselves, but that is what Warren is claiming, to continue in your analogy.
…but there’s nothing wrong with being part something. At this point we all have mixed ancestries to some extent, even if it’s just different ethnicities within the same race. As for Oklahoma, having Native blood would actually make her VERY Oklahoman. Afterall, Oklahoma was specifically designated Indian Territory by the federal government and did not even become a state in its own right until the early 20th century.
Practically it appears that her heritage did not distinguish her from anyone else who did not have such heritage.
The only reference to whether she is “white” or to the “one drop rule” is here, as a hypothetical speculation.
I don’t think anyone is arguing this, though. All of the buzz of which I am aware views this as a “took unfair advantage of affirmative action” issue.
That question, is answered by Prof. Fried, whose answer will either be satisfactory or not, based on what you already believe anyway. In any event, I think you are manufacturing an issue over the manufactured issue here.
Her status appeared in a law school directory and can be seen as her hanging out a shingle. What was Warren’s intent? Was there an expected benefit? Even if she didn’t receive a benefit from this claimed status the implication that she was nonetheless looking to benefit by mentioning it is there.
qed
You have precisely identified what’s really going on here — I completely agree.
I only postulated that statement was what the non-news reading unenrolled voter would be left with at the end of this controversy.
she took it face value, and applied the one-drop rule.
I’m sorry, you’ve dropped beneath my notice.
Next you’ll be suggesting that we rely on peer-reviewed literature to test the validity of assertions about anthropogenic climate change. I guess folks like you and me are just elitist intellectual snobs.
That’s MR effete socialist elitist intellectual snob, thank you very much….
Don’t ask me how to square socialism with elitism… I’ll leave that to the 1/2 Buddha of not-getting-cute to explain…
I’ve spent the past few days trying to wrap my head around how the same accused “affirmative action hire” can simultaneously be an “elitist”.