As we all know, Elizabeth Warren has been dogged seemingly forever — even though it’s actually been six years — by the GOP-fueled charge that she fraudulently claimed Native American ethnicity in order to gain a professorship at Harvard Law School.
I say dogged because the charge has been passed along from one political opponent of hers to the next, starting with Scott Brown and working its way up to Donald Trump. Those illustrious purveyors of pure and unvarnished truth had seemingly ensured that the charge would become a major distraction to her future political career.
And one of the things that has made their allegation so insidious is that there is a kernel of truth to it in that Warren did list herself as Native American without any solid evidence to back that claim up in the Association of American Law Schools annual directory in 1986.
But did Warren try to use that Native American claim to get the professorship at Harvard or any other educational institution, as her detractors have repeatedly claimed? She has always insisted she didn’t; but without an exhaustive review of the available evidence, it is impossible to prove a negative. And it seems that no one had undertaken that exhaustive review until now.
It certainly appears the Globe has now finally done that review, and the newspapers’s conclusion is that Warren did not try to use ethnicity to get ahead in the teaching profession. The Globe states that its review was based on hundreds of documents, many of them never before made available, as well as interviews with more than 30 members of the Harvard Law faculty who had anything to do with recruiting and appointing Warren to her professorship there.
Of 31 faculty members interviewed, “all but one said they were unaware of her claims to Native American heritage and all but one of the 31 said those claims were not discussed as part of her hire.” It turns out that 31st faculty member later said in an email to the paper that he was unsure whether the issue of her claim to be a Native American came up in the hiring discussions.
Certainly, there will always be some degree of uncertainty about this matter, and I doubt the Globe’s investigation will stop or even slow the Pocahontas epithets from Trump and his friends. But having read the piece, I think it has finally shifted the burden of proof to Warren’s opponents. Unless they are able to come up with something definitive to counter the Globe’s evidence, I think Warren has to be finally considered acquitted of the charge.
Both Warren and Harvard have said all along this was never a factor and nobody has ever credibly argued she isn’t part Cherokee. To me this does not seem like anything new.
Her opponents and those who support them don’t care one iota about truth or fact.
I doubt that this piece will make even a tiny difference. There’s nothing in this piece that wasn’t widely publicized when the vicious lie first surfaced. Those who believed it then will believe it now, and will dismiss this piece as more “fake news”.
We can all hope that Massachusetts voters will remain as unmoved by this scurrilous lie in November of 2018 as they have been each time it’s been raised in the past.
What’s next for the Globe: No evidence that Charlie Baker beats his wife? The Globe is just bringing this issue to the front, no doubt in my mind, to help whomever wins the Republican primary on Tuesday. Mark my words, the Globe will endorse that person for the senate race and have this article as “proof that it is fair and balanced”……
There is NO proof that Senator Warren has a native American heritage and there is NO proof that she used this as a bargaining chip for career advancement.
This is a nothing burger if there ever was one….unless the rich guy who owns the Globe wants to maintain the status quo and keep meddlers like Senator Warren from telling the truth to the hordes outside of his gated home and safe room…….
I disagree. If The Globe endorses Diehl I will donate $100.00 to the charity of your choice.
The Right has built an entire alternative epistemology based on narrative consistency rather than an evidence-based,, testable-fact epistemology. It’s sort of like the way novels are constructed. If something is consistent with one’s expectations of the character in the novel, it is true; if it violates that, then it’s false.
Thus, the substantial block of right wingers will say to themselves that Warren is a liberal and says things they think are obviously wrong so she is therefore not very bright, and must have gotten some kind of unfair advantage to get a professorship at Harvard.It makes perfect sense to the plot line that she claimed to be Native American and the head-in-the-clouds bureaucrats at Harvard (who cannot do anything practical, of course) would grant her a professorship based on that alone. Asking the bulk of the right to believe otherwise is like asking Twain’s readers to accept that Tom Sawyer made contributions to quantum mechanics. To these guys, the “Pocahontas story” has such resonant consistency with their worldview that it just has to be true.