Ethnic Fraud Like Me
The Boston Herald has a humdinger of a story this morning on how Massachusetts senate candidate Elizabeth Warren was touted as being Native American back in the '90s when Harvard Law School came under fire for not having a single minority female professor. The Herald asked for confirmation that she has Cherokee and Delaware Indian blood as was claimed at the time, but so far the campaign is reduced to claiming that Warren knows about her ethnic heritage solely from "family lore."
I find this all a tad amusing because, as I recount over at The Weekly Standard, I once wrote about ethnic fraud on college campuses where it can be quite advantageous to have minority status. In particular, I made a point of showing how easily fraudulent claims about ethnicity can be made:
I marched into the registrar's office and asked to change the ethnicity on my transcript. The clerk didn't bat an eye. She actually asked me, "What would you like it to be?" I told her Native American. Then she threw me for a loop. She asked what tribe. As I scrambled to remember what tribes were in the area, I remembered some family lore about my great-grandfather. One winter about a century ago, a band of Shoshone Indians were passing through and asked if they could camp out on my great-grandfather's ranch (my family owned much of the land that's now Castle Rock state park in Idaho). The Shoshone returned to the ranch the following year to give my great-grandfather a pair of impressively beaded leather gloves to thank him for his hospitality. My grandmother had them mounted and framed. They're hanging on the wall in my parents house.
In any event, I imagine this bit of family lore gives me a bigger claim to being a Shoshone Indian than a lot of people who think they're of Native American descent. If you were to pull my college transcript today, I believe it will still reflect that I'm Shoshone. I'm not, but I hope some vestigial familial respect allows any members of that proud tribe to forgive me for claiming to be among them.
Obviously, there's more illuminating context if you read the whole piece.
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Comments:
Jun '10
Re: Ethnic Fraud Like Me
To the best of my knowledge I have no Native-American blood in me, but I do hold two degrees from the University of Utah. Am I not, therefore, a Utah Ute?
Re: Ethnic Fraud Like Me
Your story reminds me of this "Dear Prudie" column in Slate.
And guess what Emily Yoffe (Prudie) advised this "Latin Not"? She told him to just play along with his false identity anyway because it would give him a leg up. And if he'd always thought he was Hispanic, it means he pretty much is. In his mind.
Nov '10
Re: Ethnic Fraud Like Me
Diane Ellis, Ed.: Your story reminds me of this "Dear Prudie" column in Slate.
And guess what Emily Yoffe (Prudie) advised this "Latin Not"? She told him to just play along with his false identity anyway because it would give him a leg up. And if he'd always thought he was Hispanic, it means he pretty much is. In his mind.
Well, this, and adoption in general, cut to the heart of what ethnic identity really means. I assure you, I won't be telling my Asian adopted daughter to list her race as Asian on any document. Of course I'm against classifying people by race at all.
Jan '11
Re: Ethnic Fraud Like Me
There is a basic logical flaw underlying racial identification - I've alluded to this before - phenotype (how they look) vs genotype (their genetic makeup). The hot button of "race" seemingly exists because of how people were treated on the basis of their appearance far more than how they are treated now. Differential handicapping in post-secondary admissions has made this an area to be gamed. Zimmerman has a predominantly Hispanic phenotype. Should he be identified as Hispanic? Warren has a strongly Caucasoid phenotype without Native American features. Should DNA testing be administered to see if there are any particular Native American genetic remnants in Warren? The bottom line is - all of this stuff may have been relevant in the past - but do we want to continue to classify people based on phenotype or genotype? Ugh, no.
Jun '11
Re: Ethnic Fraud Like Me
The New York Times shall henceforth know you as "Mark Hemingway, a white Native American."
May '10
Re: Ethnic Fraud Like Me
I'm still dreaming of getting special treatment due to my ethnic relationship this fine contribution to the world....
Sep '11
Re: Ethnic Fraud Like Me
In 1997, my son, whose first name is Spanish, was offered a full ride at Penn State . As I read between the lines of the letter making the offer, I realized this was probably a "diversity" scholarship. I phoned the woman who had signed the letter and asked if this was for "minority" students, as I didn't think my son would be what they had in mind: genetically European (my husband is from Spain) and English-speaking. "Oh no," she assured me, "with a name like that once he gets here he'll be a minority. Don't worry, we'll get him in touch with his roots." Get him in touch with his roots??? This made no sense to me until I understood that by getting in touch with his roots, she meant teaching him to see himself as a victim.
Peter Wood wrote a good book, Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (2004).
May '10
Re: Ethnic Fraud Like Me
If you had one degree, maybe. But you hold two degrees, which you clearly were able to gain only because of white privilege. Sorry.
Mar '12
Re: Ethnic Fraud Like Me
My law firm in the 1980s was a somewhat WASP-ish Midwestern corporate firm and it was apparently an embarrassment to some in the firm that we had only one or two minorities in a 60-person firm. It looked bad, we were told, on National Association of Law Placement forms that were filed with law schools from which we would recruit.
Well, heck, I was from Oklahoma so I must have some Native American blood in me, right? Well, maybe. My paternal grandmother looked somewhat like a Native American and might have had some Delaware Indians in her background. So they put me down as a minority, notwithstanding that I belonged to the old-line country club in town and my mother's family derived from those pesky Indian oppressors who landed in Plymouth in 1607.
Ethnic fraud indeed, but it makes for a good cocktail party story. And I'll bet I was as Native American as Elizabeth Warren.
Apr '12
Re: Ethnic Fraud Like Me
I know my great great grandfather's wife was Indian-- couldn't prove it by looking at her decedents, but it's really obvious in the picture. If she hadn't married a preacher, there'd only be "family lore" to back that up. Does it matter? Only for family history... unless one is a racist, especially of the one-drop school.
Sadly, that is a sizable portion of the population. It's just somehow OK because they attach special honor to the one-drop race. (At least, as long as you behave like they think you should....)
Jul '10
Re: Ethnic Fraud Like Me
If I recall correctly, when CU was trying to fire the odious Ward Churchill, one of the claims they made to justify his firing was that he had committed "academic fraud" by claiming to be American Indian when he was, in fact, not.
Ethnicity as an academic credential. There are no words.
Feb '11
Re: Ethnic Fraud Like Me
An acquaintance of mine is of mixed ancestry; mother French (several generations in the Americas, but not the U.S.) and father Greek. She barely knew her father at all as a child and had no contact with him whatsoever as an adult. Seeking to get into post-graduate school, she discovered an obscure scholarship for children of Greek ancestry wishing to pursue her desired advanced degree. Overnight she went from being a typical American to a Greek, including changing her last name to Papa-something-or-other. She got the scholarship.
(I've filed off the serial numbers in my description to some extent, since I am not looking to make trouble for her by making it easy for someone to figure out who I'm talking about . The story is true.)
May '10
Re: Ethnic Fraud Like Me
Maybe Scott Brown could claim that he's ---you know---brown.
Sep '11
Re: Ethnic Fraud Like Me
profdlp, sometimes those scholarships are funded not by the university but by individual alums or ethnic organizations, which I think puts them in a different category from the ethnic sorting done by the schools themselves.
Nov '10
Re: Ethnic Fraud Like Me
The only real "race" as such is human. The interesting thing is that we are not allowed to say that in the US. A European lefty friend of mine approved of that idea when I said something about it on Facebook; little did she know that she was violating the code of conduct for American leftists.
Apr '12
Re: Ethnic Fraud Like Me
Mark, good for you. Game the system. You may even make it to Chief Hemmingway on day.
Jul '11
Re: Ethnic Fraud Like Me
If we truely wanted to destroy the whole affirmative action narrative all we would have to do is claim all affiliations we have legal rights to. Your family lore says you have Indian, Hispanic, Asian, etc blood then claim them. If you come from an average American family that has been in country several generations then you can probably claim several. Ever looked at somebody of the same sex and thought they looked good? Then claim GLBT. If enough people would do this it would show affirmative action to be the flim flam sham it is.
Apr '11
Re: Ethnic Fraud Like Me
Are there any (real) American Indian or Canadian Indian Ricochet members? If so, and if they are willing to identify themselves, I would be very interested to hear what they think about all of this.