That is a crazy story. I'm still stunned by this paragraph:
Rachel Dolezal has since told local media she is not in touch with the couple because of an ongoing lawsuit, and that she does not view them as her real parents.
I'm not sure I buy OP.last. I realize you can sort of drift into a huge lie by little steps, but this seems more fucked up.
The story is great the whole way through.
Her parents have confirmed that they lived in a teepee, but before their daughter was born.
Anyway, now I know what Twitter was talking about.
I saw this on my FB feed and also thought it was crazy. My snarky thought was that it was probably easy to fake being black in Spokane, because most people there have never probably seen a "real" black person before.*
*I spent about three weeks there in HS in the late 90s, and it was kind of a racially dystopian hell hole. My closest friend there in HS was adopted from Korea as a baby. She was the only non-white person she knew, and the level of casual racism she experienced was also really awful. I later met a black federal civil rights worker who lives on the outskirts, and the level of violence she experienced was insane. Think like, someone killing her dog and leaving it on her doorstep with a death threat pinned to the body (she thought it was more for being a federal employee than for being black).
2: I think heebie meant to say "blackpeddle."
I was there during the summer that Aryan Nations marched through the city, so my perspective may have been colored somewhat. Maybe Spokane is better now that they no longer exist.
I suppose she deserves points for hubris, and also for claiming to be black so close to the white supremacists of Coeur d'Alene.
So, the trolly question would be:
We're at a point where sex can be a self-claimed identity, what makes race different?
Obviously, I think it's different, but I sure don't have a theory. I also don't think we need a theory, but it's arguably an interesting question.
Semi-pwned by Buttercup. Aryan Nations is back, incidentally, or at least some affiliated group. Apparently having Obama as president was good for recruitment.
We're at a point where sex can be a self-claimed identity, what makes race different?
Race can be a self-claimed identity - there are plenty of people who are ambiguously ethnic or whose skin tone doesn't obviously match their identity. The problem with her is the appearance that the privilege cuts both ways - that she's claiming to be black for self-aggrandizing, but was white growing up and got all those benefits for it.
9: The analogy ban has never been more appropriate. But here's a response from more lived experience.
Dolezal has told Buzzfeed she will make a fuller statement soon.
I hope she comes out with a 20 page document that blames IRB regulations.
13: That is so much better than what I was going to say, which was basically nothing but grar and sarcasm.
One of my friends just came out as a trans woman and is getting a lot of grief along these same lines from a TERFy acquaintance.
I suppose it says something about the position of women in America that one thought it necessary to pretend to another oppressed class to get people to pay attention to her.
17: My guess is that it got her more attention from black people.
12
Obviously as a social construct race isn't very clear cut, esp. because racial categories don't map all that well onto phenotypic difference, and there are going to be lots of ambiguous cases.* Race is also about things like religion** and (at least historically) language, which have nothing to do with genetics. This is weird because it seems most blatantly to be about inventing an identity for attention, like those people who fake cancer. She could have done everything she did as a white woman probably as easily, so it wasn't like she "had" to pass for professional gain.
It also shows how strong the one-drop rule is in the US, because she did very little to pass physically. Bronzer and a dark curly wig seemed to make her "black," even though she still looked pretty white. I suppose it's so unusual that anyone would try to pass in that direction that few people really asked questions.
*My cousin gets this. She has a Southern European mom so has olive coloring, a really Catholic first name, and took her Latino husband's last name, so everyone assumes she's Latina. She was in the Nat. Guard, and gets asked to mentor minority women and speak as a minority woman in the service all the time. I can't remember if she does or doesn't, I think she might while being upfront that she is not herself Latina.
**Like, why are Armenians unambiguously white and Iranians "brown"?
like those people who fake cancer.
Ha, I've been getting all sorts of misplaced cancer sympathy lately. It's ridiculous. From the hysterectomy and then also from the tattoo artist that I consulted with. He essentially said, "This tattoo is really easy for me and I wouldn't usually waste my time, but your story and the cancer is just so powerful." I re-stated that I don't actually have cancer.
18: Yes, white academics aren't at all cringingly deferential and submissive to the subaltern, oppressed, dark Other.
Less generously than 17: This is cosplay, right? More questionable, ethically if not aesthetically, than dressing up like Sarah Connor, Starbuck or Snoopy's cousin Belle, but still.
13 is good. But the comparison she sets up as relatively analagogous is someone who is a white Latina who grows up alienated from the Latina aspects of her background. But her actual background matters, whereas what matters for transsexuals is just experience--and that's fine. I fully believe that there's a robust "experience of myself as sex x", disconnected from birth sex, that doesn't analogize to the experience of being of a certain race.
19.2 Trevor Noah in one of his routines tells a story about getting a bank account when arriving in America. He got to the bit about 'race' and had to ask the teller which box he should check, because he is biracial. He was told "oh just do whatever it doesn't matter" but it turned out that checking the "white" box resulted in a very (socially) awkward interaction.
The odd thing to me about the story in the OP isn't that she was claiming to be black - the whole 'gets some extra benefit in a specific mostly academic setting to letting people make the mistake and then getting in over her head' type story is a natural one that happens all the time, though not always to this extreme. The weird relationship she seems to have with her family makes me wonder if there isn't a bit more going on than that, because there's clearly some kind of problem/history there even if it isn't actually playing a role in her passing as black.
I kind of have things to say about this, but I'll probably just throw out links for now instead. Her spirit self-portrait is black. There's also Mindy Kaling's fake-black brother from the conservative side of being an asshole and pretending to be black for politicized reasons. Um.
Musician Johnny Otis famously (and openly) decided to live his life as if he was black.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Otis#Personal_life
Her (ex?)husband made horrible videos with photos of her and her art.
24: The "black" picture for Kaling's brother looks like a really shitty photoshop.
If she had a black grandparent this would all be ok, right? What about a great-grandparent? Great-great-grandparent? If I were here I'd get a DNA test and pray that it came back above 10%.
Jezebel is on a roll:
http://jezebel.com/rachel-dolezal-definitely-nailed-the-hair-ill-give-her-1710899988
http://jezebel.com/i-have-questions-about-that-white-lady-who-maybe-preten-1710807777
21.2: Not much "play" about it.
I love this line, from 29:
This story has the distinct honor of being both incredibly offensive, yet not at all offensive, as well as hilarious.
30 comments in and nobody's made a "where it counts" joke? Standards are slipping around here.
Tara Brown at Jezebel is great. I skipped over her weekly Friday afternoon piece, Shade Court, for a long time, but after reading one of them, I went back to read them all.
9: You admit you're trolling, but I first heard about this professor via a similar question in earnest on Reddit.
I've mentioned now and then that I've spent less time here partly as I've discovered more efficient time-wasters, that among them. I may have to cut back on it, though, because lately I'm getting sucked into too many political-ish arguments.
The first link is 29 is really interesting to me because my reaction to the pictures of her with coils was "ok yeah I can see how that was at least a bit ambiguous" and my reaction to all the other pictures was "what is that crazy white woman doing?". I don't have a clue why - maybe just that they're hair styles that you sometimes also see on white people?
And she claimed to have type 4 hair?? That should have been the giveaway, because no. Just no.
Isn't it un-American to deny people the right to identify themselves how they like? She could call herself a purple duck -- wouldn't make her one, but it likewise wouldn't do anyone else any harm. If she wasn't comfortable in her own skin, who am I to gainsay her for doing what she had to do to make it through her life thus far?
I laughed out loud at this, from 37:
Mary J Blige doesn't want hateration or holleration in where?
A) Her home
B) At work
C) In cars
D) This Dancery
William Henry Dietz was famously put on trial in Spokane for attempted passing. Nolo'd, but luckily for him George Preston Marshall, he of the Racist Legacy, was willing to look the other way.
I feel like the "are the worst off better off?" Heuristic might be applicable and might okay her. I can imagine a novel in which she's an awful person and also one in which she's a sort of pratfall heroine.
We're at a point where sex can be a self-claimed identity, what makes race different?
No difference, really. But I think there is a disconnect because people who are allies of the trans community frequently also see themselves as allies of the black community, and therefor desire to protect black identities from being co-opted by white people and their privilege.
If that's true, the distinction between which identity claims that you are and are not willing to view as legitimate is mostly a function of who's side you feel you are on, from which point concerns over apparent inconsistency can be reasoned away.
Isn't 43.1 essentially the much-maligned TERF argument?
I think that talking of self-identification is pretty much beside the point here. It's not her self-identification that caused the problem. It's the public speaking/teaching/leadership without telling anybody.
But she did that because open self-identification would have been a problem
Claiming to be transgender will evoke a very different set of expectations in the other party about your childhood than claiming to be black will. For so very many reasons.
So trans people have to tell everyone they're trans or else it's a problem?
46: That's because what she's doing is fucknuts. I wonder if her parents didn't go public because she was talking about running for office or something.
48: I wouldn't say that, but I'd think that if you were seeing a job at NOW or a woman's studies department, you should at least mention it to them.
Will laughing at this woman for being transracial seem as awful in ten years as laughing at someone for being transgender seems right now?
I think 50 would make a lot of trans people real mad.
I've a plausible claim to native american identity. I've never claimed it in any situation where it might give me any conceivable advantage because there is no way that advantage was meant for me. I have claimed it when I thought it might have a positive influence, eg when someone said something derogatory on the assumption there were no Indians present, or after having gotten into an institution it might help others to get in by publicly already being there. But I'm all instrumentality from top to bottom, I've nothing emotionally invested in Indianness whatsoever. Seems like this woman's issues are way deeper.
49 I think her father may be a disgraced former public official. (County commissioner investigated for fraudulent travel reimbursements etc, lost reelection, charges thrown out.) That might be someone else, though.
51 No.
51: I've set a calendar reminder to check in 2025.
52: I don't know, but if it does I'm O.K. with that.
50: and let anybody else decide if you were really a woman? Nope! Is the counterargument as I understand it.
I am more curious about whether she would have been as successful if raised in a black family (see transgender scientists' reports), and about any raised-black candidates for her jobs.
My charitable reading is that she fell in love with another culture, and who she could be in it, which is all kinds of risky but I think humanity without that instinct would be even worse.
51: I've set a calendar reminder to check in 2025.
I laughed at this now, while I still can.
I am more curious about whether she would have been as successful if raised in a black family
If her primary guardians had been black, I would be defending her right to claim blackness.
I can't be the only one thinking of Steve Martin right now.
Also the tweet in 40 is still making me giggle.
58: That's interesting, on grounds of solidarity? If so, would black siblings count?
The trans analogy strikes me as bonkers. Here's the thing -- you are most definitely participate in "black" culture if you're white. She could have kept her blonde hair and still been into all kinds of coded-black cultural things. She could even have claimed that this made her culturally "black" (at least in large part) in the US. It's fine and honest to do so while also being honest about your own background. Lying about that is just fraudulent, so she comes across as a ridiculous phony, not some black on the inside person that society is just not allowing to show her true color.
58: On grounds of...what happens when you're a small child is yours to claim as yours no matter how incongruous it strikes other people? What I'd really do is make a bold statement and then entreat someone more eloquent to flesh it out.
Wow, I hadn't realized she went to Howard.
so she comes across as a ridiculous phony
Except for the hair.
59 is also making me laugh. Everything about this woman is just ridiculously funny.
My brother and I were just talking about this- Steve Martin came up (me), and a Dave Chapelle sketch about a blind black white supremacist (him).
It actually seems more like something else, to me. Internet cancer, maybe, or people who fake disabilities. Or just compulsive liars in general, I guess.
Anyway I am also interested to see what the fallout is with all the innuendo about faked hate crimes.
"blind black white supremacist" is not the easiest-to-parse thing I've ever said. A person who believes in the supremacy of white people, is blind, and, unbeknownst to him, black.
Siblings, parents, passing - what seems salient to me is not familiarity with Black culture but whether one has suffered the insults directed at Black people, and (less) whether one believed one had an out. I have seen the blonde child with black siblings get treated as more specially white, but in my imagination that doesn't work so well with black parents.
Am looking forward to comedy's better takes on this.
I feel much more white because I have black children, which I think is a good thing.
I'm just hoping the False Analogy of Race and Transition (from the link in 13) catches on as an acronym.
And if my daughters grow up to say they were raised white I'll feel like I should have done better but that they're probably being fair. If they grow up to say they ARE white, we will have words.
||
E. Messily, have there been any health developments? Did you start taking all the vitamins and feel better?
|>
we will have words
Will the words start with "Sweetheart, I've been meaning to mention a few things to you."?
77: I have to be honest and admit they would probably begin Giiiiiiiiiirl!
I knew a white asshole who claimed to be Asian because he'd gone to international school in Hong Kong. I also knew a different white asshole who checked the Native American box on his college admissions, because he was born in the US. He also won a prestigious scholarship for underprivileged students (he was from an underprivileged background, but I'm sure the school thinking he was Native American added a lot to that). Luckily white people are the unmarked race so I haven't (yet) come to the conclusion all white people are assholes, but it's a strong possibility.
But...while those people were clearly assholes, this woman really does seem crazy instead. Faking her race is high risk, little reward, and not something you can get away with forever.
If you have to have that conversation, she's not going to understand that opening.
I started taking all the vitamins (500 mg B2 3x/day, 2000 mg L-Carnitine 3x/day) but so far all that's happened is that my urine turned chartreuse and my digestive system has been throwing a 3-week-long tantrum.
The doctor said not to expect anything for 4-6 months at the earliest, so.
That's a long time to wait for results. They better be awesome when they get there.
Right? L-Carnitine is expensive, too, and my stupid insurance won't pay for it because it's not real medicine.
I do think this is wrong from 13 (or, at least, it's not where I was coming from in raising the question):
First off, this [analogy] is based on the assumption that race is an incontrovertable fact of biology that never changes for anyone. That is simply not true. Race is influenced by biological features, but which features are important will vary from region to region. The importance of race is primarily social.
My point was more the opposite: what racial and gender categories mean, along with what individuals fall under them, are social constructs, but we (on the cultural left who are sympathetic to trans claims) now see the self-claiming of gender identities by individuals as legitimate but not racial identities. The reason we (at least "we" who are not trans) do that is because we trust the testimony of trans people that their experience of being a gender that they weren't assigned at birth is genuine, and because they are also suffering a lot of violence and discrimination for living that experience. None of which adds up to a principled theory, but, like I said, I don't think we need a theory.
On the trans thing:
No one commits suicide because they "feel black" but are not able to live as a black person. No one suffers from profound depression and sexual dysfunction because they "feel black" but are are not able to live as black. No one is cured of these things by transitioning to blackness.
No one seeks painful surgery to "become black". No one commits to a lifelong, expensive, heavily gate-kept medical regime in order to "become black".
There is no global tradition persisting over human history and across culture of whatever the racial equivalent of bakla, two-spirit, hijra, man-living women, etc, would be.
The way racial and gender identities are produced and experienced are not the same.
Saying that some kind of made up *chan trollery about "transracial" identity is somehow the equivalent of being transgender is like saying that feeling kind of low for a week because your favorite band broke up is the same as clinical depression because both are in your head and both involve feeling down.
It baffles me why people want to treat this extremely embodied, visceral thing about bodies, gender and identity as something akin to arguing about hit points in D&D.
I've a plausible claim to native american identity.
What's your claim? And what does plausible mean? Are you enrolled? Even if not, most tribal entities have pretty clear guidelines for determining affiliation, though I suppose it can get tricky in some instances.
85: maybe this woman will be the first!
Also, somebody grew up in Spokane without ever even seeing a Native person? That's a neat trick.
Even if not, most tribal entities have pretty clear guidelines for determining affiliation, though I suppose it can get tricky in some instances.
Like, for example, if the tribe owns a casino.
I went to the symphony and never even saw a violin.
I was thinking more about the way that traditional tribal leaders have pretty clearcut ways of determining who is and who isn't Native. All of which sometimes leaves me a little bit uncomfortable about Elizabeth Warren, though I've never actually been able to figure out if she ticked boxes for preferential treatment (I suppose I could figure it out, but that would require work, and I don't really want to start digging through her cultural appropriation drawer). Anyway, yeah, the disenrollment stuff is another example.
No one seeks painful surgery to "become black". No one commits to a lifelong, expensive, heavily gate-kept medical regime in order to "become black".
Oh sure, just ignore Michael Jackson's suffering.
I really liked Goldie Taylor's take:
Dear Rachel,
You can be white.
It's okay to be white and support social justice in this country and around the globe. In fact, our collective strength is increased under the broad tent of inclusiveness. In recent months, as people from every walk of life streamed onto the streets and highways shouting "Black lives matter!" I could not help but be taken by the diversity of the demonstrators. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a white girl in North Charleston, listening to the lyrical genius of a Puerto Rican rapper in Atlanta, or catching the live streams of a Palestinian citizen journalist in Ferguson, gave me hope that this movement will endure.
That ability to connect and love, despite centuries-long oppression, behind a greater calling is something to be celebrated. I would eagerly link arms with you, lead you to my table to break bread and share my culture with you.
Let me be real with you, though.
By posing as a woman of African descent, you elected to forego the opportunity to be a strong, lifelong and credible ally worthy of our collective embrace. You were not content to simply be an ally and stand with me in solidarity. Instead, thinking mimicry was flattery, you adopted what you believed was my language, hairstyles, fashions and mannerisms. Seeking out a love and a sense of sisterhood that was already available to you, you altered your complexion. Along the way, you used these caricatures as currency to pave your way to prominence.
Your transformation had everything to do with growing your personal platform. As long as you are doing "the work," it doesn't matter, right? I mean, so what if you seized positions and opportunities that may have gone to someone of color?
[...]
For the record, I do not accept your ruse as a compliment. Centering yourself in the midst of someone else's pain makes you not a comforter, but a co-conspiring perpetrator.
You are a gifted artist. Your paintings are glorious. But knowing that you have parlayed your newfound blackness into a platform from which to teach my young sisters and brothers how to navigate theirs is galling to me. You see, like me, they have no choice but to walk out of that room and stay black--for all of the benefits and tragedies that sometimes come with that. They cannot duck it like the third shift at work or shed it like a winter coat.
We do not have the power to "transcend blackness."
Bolding mine.
I certainly agree with her take but it sounds like Goldie Taylor takes both herself and this incident WAY too seriously.
Great-great-grandmother on mother's side was full-blooded . Whatever percentage that works out to. Never cared much except we inherited the old wedding photograph ca 1880 which looked really neat on the wall.
Nothing to say about Spokane.
punctuation fail
"full blooded (tribe)" left out because provides geographical information
85: I don't think it's fair to say that this is motivating by chan trollery or "something akin to arguing about hit points in D&D" in this instance, but I understand that arguments very like these have been employed to hurt trans people. And I understand why, because of those arguments, trans people and supporters of them would be particularly harsh of people like this woman.
But I dunno. Claiming that her doing this is mental illness doesn't feel right to me. And while she hasn't been treated as awfully as most trans people have--although being the laughing stock of both the internet and national TV news is a more horrible experience than I can imagine--I'm sympathetic to the analogy
I'm sure I'm being a squishy liberal in the most despicable way, but I just don't think this view takes anything away from transness (except perhaps in a political way--but I wouldn't publicize these thoughts in a less lefty venue). There are differences in degree and kind, as you said--I don't think this should be supported with government money in the same way I think trans-related medicine should be--but I see it as an opportunity to being more empathetic to more people.
It's not like hijra or two-spirit, but there have long been people who have felt uncomfortable in their own culture and left to join another. Sometimes this has been pejoratively called "going native". A very old case I'm somewhat familiar with were the "Old English" Hiberno-Normans in Ireland before the Tudor reconquest. And of course ethnic/racial boundaries have been less policed, or differently policed, in different times and places than they are now.
I don't know what she's thinking, or why. Maybe she *is* the racial equivalent of the boogyman male who pretends to be trans to be a creeper. She's certainly used blackness as a bludgeon in a way that's awfully shitty for someone who grew up with white privilege. (Her Facebook post on 12 Years a Slave is beyond belief.)
So, *insert that shrug emoticon here*. I'll let myself out for grand analogy usage.
"you used these caricatures as currency to pave your way to prominence"
I don't think the Spokane NAACP counts as prominence.
98: According to Twitter, she has a tenure-track (or tenured?) university position in Black Studies. Those don't grow on trees. And in fact, some such positions are held by white women -- so it wasn't even the only way she could have gotten it.
though I've never actually been able to figure out if she ticked boxes for preferential treatment
I thought she ticked boxes for preferential treatment for Harvard. They were like "hey, does anyone have some diversity on them?" and she was like "sure, I got some" but it did not advance her career.
Pre-casino, with a bit of paperwork wrangling, yes could have enrolled. Post-casino, not so much! Which is absolutely fine with me. The only real effect it's had on my life has been the same for me as it is for the uncounted gazillions of other people with hard luck scrabbling major raging alcoholics rampant in the family background and the slow grasping towards that bit more of middle class security with each generation.
Before drawing the analogy to gender, why not just reverse the races?
It seems to me that there are social relations that make certain types of re-identification more or less acceptable. Faking it upwards can be admirable or frowned upon depending on where you stand. Faking it downwards is generally just mockable (e.g. Eminem's final rap battle in 8 Mile).
Authenticity is generally derived from social norms plus a heaping of bullshit. I mean, all "outrage" here boils down to the idea that there is a "deeper truth" that is disrespected when people play pretend. This is a very general logic that can be deployed whenever someone does something that viscerally rubs you the wrong way.
Also the indoctrination lectures in the parking lots of the missions to fortify us against the lies sure to be peddled re the catholic church's enslavement of the Indians really freaked me out, but then I was the youngest. The really graphic bloody crucifixes didn't help.
The stuff about Warren receiving preferential treatment is pure Republican 'imply that there's something there enough and eventually people will remember having heard something like that' smearing. She says that she has some Native American ancestry, and she's been listed as having it in some places, but it's not obvious how much of it is real and how much is general 'you know our family has some native american in it' mythology stuff. But no one has been able to dig up any evidence of it making a difference for her career or for her getting any preferential treatment as a result of it. (I mean, seriously - would it be a half remembered maybe-a-scandal right now if there was evidence of that? It would probably be a Homeric epithet at this point if there had been.)
VW, Cherokee citizenship is different from most Native nations: rather than a percentage, one has to be a descendant of at least one person on the list made around the turn of the 20th century.
For someone my age, I'd say that means more or less a 16th, I'd say: my 1/32 ancestors were born in the 1790s-1810s; without looking, I'd doubt any were alive in the 1900 US census. But some of their children were. I don't have grandchildren yet -- no hurry, but my daughter will be 29 in a couple of weeks, so it's in range -- but if I did, they'd be looking at 1/64th ancestry (at least) from a specific person alive in 1900.
Like I said, I've never cared enough to do any real digging. The issue, in my mind, is about the definition of Native identity. I don't actually care if she tells stories about her Cherokee grandmother. Lots of people have stories like that, and there's no obligation to verify them. But if she self-identified as Native American on applications, I think she should have checked the family stories first and then done some research about how the Cherokees figure out who is and who isn't a member (not that it's always simple, given the tribe's history of owning slaves).
I thought the Supreme Court's discussion of this in that Cherokee adoption case last year was inappropriately dismissive.
This story seemed a lot funnier when it was a plot point for the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
I don't think her professor job is that fancy. All the news articles I've seen say adjunct.
Yeah, I dunno. It seems to me that there's a lot of different ways to unpack the spurious gender/race analogy here. Certainly there are a number of correspondences. And yet, of course, they're just not the same.
W/r/t the Nativeness question, VW's assertion is like, the understatement of the century. The last 130 years or so have been marked continuously by debates over who is a "real Indian" -- and those questions have been decided in just about every way imaginable. Take the category of "Metis" -- it's a real, no-foolin' legal racial category in Canada, but nobody even knows the word here in the states. So if you were born in Ontario, but moved here as a baby, and your parents raised you as either white or Native, but then you move back to Canada when you're grown up, and correctly and legally claim a Metis identity -- what then? Are you appropriating something? Does it matter if you were raised white or raised Native? I know many, many Native people here in MPLS who could easily pass as white in virtually any context, but can't or won't or don't for whatever reasons seem good to them. Are they somehow weakening the identity of Nativeness, or alternatively, strengthening it?
Or consider my little friend whose mom has had such a hard life. She has a Black grandfather. She can also pass for white. But her mother, about the palest person I know, grew up stone working class, in a Black neighborhood. And the kid in turn is being raised in pretty straitened circumstances. So if she wants to claim her multiracial identity down the road, it seems to me she's going to have more lived insight into what Blackness means, based on her class position and cultural referents, that someone with the identical ethnic background who has been raised middle class.
The EWU website calls her a "Quarterly Professor," whatever that means.
9: I'm not going to be able to catch up on this thread until tomorrow morning, but this is an issue I've been thinking about all day, and it really puzzles me.
Here's the thing: 20 years ago, i would have never guessed that people would stop policing the gender boundary before they stopped policing the racial boundary. After all, gender---or at least sex---is far more biologically real than race.
I think this issue is puzzling in a very interesting way, but apparently everyone else on the internet thinks that making this comparison is specious and transphobic. The link in 19 seems to suggest that the only reason to even put the two cases in the same paragraph is if you believe that trans people are "really" one gender and just "pretending" to be the other. But my instinct is to totally take the analogy in the other way. Dolezal isn't a person who was "really" white but "pretending" to be black, because race isn't "really" a thing.
113: Weird. A Googlin' basically only comes up with her page and bunch of false positives (e.g. "in Something Quarterly, Professor Foo.."). Must be something racist.
I guess the lesson here is the a pure social construct, like race, is actually a more robust category than a biological division. Things that are biological can be changed surgically. The material differences can be materially altered. Changing social categories, on the other hand, requires changing people's minds.
I want to make a joke about Rachel dolezal being like the white-and-gold no it's blue-and-black dress, but I can't figure out the phrasing.
All of which sometimes leaves me a little bit uncomfortable about Elizabeth Warren, though I've never actually been able to figure out if she ticked boxes for preferential treatment
Eh, I guess I don't even want to know whether she ticked the boxes (oh, please say that she didn't...).
I love me some Elizabeth Warren. And I realize that the Warren 'Fauxcahontas' story is the stuff of Faux News wet dreams.
But still, it does make me uncomfotable.
True story, true confession: growing up, I was all but convinced that one branch of my family was, well, just must have been, First Nation. That was the family story, the family legend. The "Indian Princess" syndrome.
And then I looked into the records, and traced those hosers directly back to Co. Cavan, Ireland (I even have an Irish townland, and shit). No Canadian aboriginal origins whatsoever! just some Irish emigrants with black hair and a dark and roving eye. It is to cringe.
And there are actually, you know, genealogical standards of evidence, which makes Warren's reliance on family report a little bit, well, cringe-worthy.
She appears to be the only Quarterly Professor at EWU. So I guess it's not just some idiosyncratic naming convention there.
116 There's a real difference between assuming an identity you know is false -- Dietz, for example -- and assuming one you believe, in your heart of hearts, to be true (eg Jenner).
Reverting to my sexy and sultry Latino persona.
I certainly agree with her take but it sounds like Goldie Taylor takes both herself and this incident WAY too seriously.
I have some sympathy (or at least lack of animosity) for Rachel Dolezal is this regard: her case is so unusual and peculiar that I don't know that there's much in the way of general lessons to take from it. As such, even though I find her odd and disturbing, I suspect that become a national news story in the way that she has is more than sufficient punishment for whatever harm she may have done.
I think there is a debate to be had about both appropriation of black culture* by white people and the question of why would somebody reject the role of ally, but I don't know that using Rachel Dolezal as an example or case study actually sheds much light.
So I'd be inclined to just leaver her alone, but I can understand why some people would be really upset with her.
* See this article about Iggy Azalea, for example.
Come on here what is this "never been able to find out if she checked a box for preferential treatment" stuff? You are posting comments on the magical answer-box of the internet.
Elizabeth Warren (1) has claimed to have native american heritage*; (2) was listed in the Association of American Law Schools as being a minority**; and (3) Harvard at some point included her on their list of minority professors as proof of their we're-not-all-rich-white-guys-seriously-we-promise status (not necessarily with her knowledge). She didn't use it to gain preferential treatment on any job or college applications (because, again obviously, people dug through as many files as possible looking for something and all they ended up with was innuendo). And she was recruited to Harvard from Penn so it's hard to see how she could have "checked a box" on that one.
So: the AALS listing has her listed as a minority (of some kind at all they never really say), and presumably that's because she checked a box to indicate that at some point. No application for anything on record has her indicating that she was native american, or applying for preferential treatment. Seriously here. Stop repeating dumb right wing crap.
*Verifiably? It's at the "ehhhhh maybe" level, which is to say, she heard it from her family when growing up.
**As far as anyone has found this is where a box was checked, and only this.
124 was me (stupid computer inconsistently remembering information.)
An ex of mine insisted I was actually an Asian (east Asian) bloke who just happened to be white in appearance, which I never knew quite how to take.
Her Facebook post on 12 Years a Slave is beyond belief
Got a link? I can't find it.
Analogy alert: the historian Guy Halsall has written extensively and convincingly (to me) about the process whereby people in 5th/6th century Europe who were born Roman (and whose ancestors had presumably been Gauls or Iberians) became Franks and Goths. The key thing about this was that you couldn't just stand up and announce that henceforth you were going to be a Frank (which gave you legal privileges); you had to be accepted by your fellow Franks. However, if you were so accepted and dressed like a Frank and talked like a Frank and so on, eventually you became a Frank with the right to speak in court, serve in the army, etc.
The key distinction here is that this was a way in which the elite hung onto its status, so there was a good deal of pressure to transition and a shitload of people trying to do it, whereas becoming African American is superficially less enticing for white people because it generally involves loss of privilege. Nevertheless Johnny Otis, as ttaM points out. If this woman has culturally assimilated to the African American community AND been accepted by it, in what way is she not African American? Skin colour? Sally Hemmings would like a word.
You can't adopt a different ethnicity on your own, but if you are accepted by the ethnic community in question you can and people have throughout history.
So, the trolly question would be:
I don't see what that has to do with it at all- will people send the train in a different direction if one of the victims is actually black vs passing as black?
I have some sympathy (or at least lack of animosity) for Rachel Dolezal is this regard: her case is so unusual and peculiar that I don't know that there's much in the way of general lessons to take from it.
Me too. I think anger at her is misplaced.
Also, to continue the terrible analogy, here's one real similarity between RD and a trans person: the legitimate fear of being discovered and the disproportionately huge punishment. (Not that there should be a small punishment. You know what I mean.)
I do think she's a total whackjob, though.
129: east Asian, actually. So she should know!
Sexist. If a white man pretends to be black to get a job, he gets a Oscar nomination.
I'm surprised that no one has followed up on 85.last. I'll give it a try.
"The 40+ year debate over whether hit points represent explicit physical damage or a more abstract measure of ability to continue fighting is like the argument over whether gender is at least partially innate or else wholly performative. They are really the same argument taking place in 2 different spheres."
My entry in the "most ban-able analogy of all" contest.
I rolled an 18 for a save against being convinced.
*Verifiably? It's at the "ehhhhh maybe" level, which is to say, she heard it from her family when growing up.
I'm not seeing the maybe here. The thing is, lots of people hear lots of stuff from their families. But her claim of Native American heritage is a verifiable claim, which cannot be verified by any actual evidence. It's not just dumb right wing crap to find this problematic.
Warren? I thought the NA connection was real but tenuous -- a grandparent or something with partial ancestry. Clearly, no strong personal connection, not entitled to be enrolled in a tribe, but not made up out of whole cloth. Let me google.
137 -- To be fair, it wouldn't have been anywhere near as easily falsifiable back when she first heard/repeated the story.
139 -- I understand it to be zero, but that's not a conclusion based on independent study.
There's no mention of the controversy on Warren's wikipedia entry. Oh, but look, here's a specific Elizabeth Warren wiki, how convenient! Oh, all the faux-authoritative references are to right-wing blogs.
That's a nice trick, write a neutral-sounding website that looks factual by writing other websites then linking back and forth between them. Isn't that essentially how the SCOTUS conservatives write law these days?
I just did some quick googling. From what I can tell the state of the evidence is not ruled out -- it's not as all her ancestors had been traced back to Ireland like Jane's. The positive evidence is almost nonexistent -- there's a 2006 report in some genealogical publication from someone who said they saw a marriage license application from the 1890s where her great great great grandmother identified herself as Cherokee, but no one could find the document once the story turned into a thing.
But still, there's something in writing from before anyone cared saying that they saw real evidence.
142 That's tribal. Who wants to embarrass the senator, and who doesn't want to do so?
Here. So, even if the amateur genealogist was dead wrong, as of 2006 people other than her family thought it was true, which seems to me to give her some cover.
143 -- That's exactly the sort of thing that no one in the field would remotely accept. And verifiability of things is much different now than even in 2006 (although even then, the woman's parents, grandparents etc would have been identified (and I think actually are) by name and ethnicity back decade by decade to the 1850 census, and in various other documents well before that.)
I'm mostly defending Warren as excusably wrong, if wrong, and not confirmed as wrong. There's purely internal family mythology (Buck's family has a Native American story that skids around from generation to generation and no one's quite clear on the names. So, really, bullshit.) and something with identifiable individuals who people outside the family thought they knew to be Native American, which is where Warren was.
145, 147 -- Oh, only mean spirited people think she invented the story herself, and, it seems to me, they have even less basis for that contention than she does for the story. And there's nothing wrong with telling stories you've heard from great aunts -- the question is what sort of verification are you supposed to do before you let your employer start touting your story and how embarrassed are you supposed to be if it turns out that the story you told your employer, and they touted it, turns out not to be true.
Then again, she thought herself to be 1/32 Native or less -- and she should surely have understood in late 20th century America that that's not what they mean when they're listing which faculty are members of racial minorities. Liberals are not supposed be proponents of a one drop rule.
People shouldn't let her off the hook just because she's much, much less evil on tangible issues than any available alternative.
Come on here what is this "never been able to find out if she checked a box for preferential treatment" stuff?
As I said just after that, I've never bothered to/wanted to find out.
Seriously here. Stop repeating dumb right wing crap.
???
The question marks signal that I don't know if you're talking to me. If you are: a) what crap am I repeating? b) how is what I've said qualitatively different than what you've said? c) fuck off.
Its is really so bad for somebody to find credibility in the family stories they grew up with, even if they don't rise to the level of verifiable proof that would convince an outsider? "Grandma said she was part Cherokee. I knew Grandma, loved Grandma, and trusted Grandma. I'm not going to believe Grandma's a liar just because you can't find 100 year old documents to verify what she said."
"I was only saying that if Hillary had murdered Vince Foster that would have been a big deal that's all, I haven't looked into it or anything..."
My great uncle said we were descended from Spaniards who were shipwrecked off the coast of Ireland after the defeat of the Spanish Armada. I don't think anybody considered that very likely. It seemed unnecessarily complicated to explain Irish people with dark hair.
Carp gets it 100% right in 148, 149, which, conveniently, accord in part with what I've said upthread: there's no shame in believing stories one hears from one's grandparents; there's shame in using those stories (or even in allowing them to be used by others) for some advantage, without first verifying them and checking with the relevant tribe to see how that body defines membership.
From you, I know what you meant, everyone who knows you knows what you meant -- that you've never gotten interested enough to look into it. But what you said was that you have been unable to find out whether she got preferential treatment, which is pretty indistiguishable from what would be real right-wing crap: "There are genuine unanswered questions about to what extent Warren exploited her baseless claims of NA heritage for preferential treatment." If you looked into it, it'd be clear that she didn't.
So, I know what you meant, but it doesn't seem unreasonable for MPHP to have reacted with a bit of irritation to what you said.
154: did I say something like that? Seriously, don't put words in my mouth.
157: ah, I see. The absolutely least charitable reading of what I said led to the misunderstanding. Okay.
153 I don't think there's anything remotely wrong with that. That's really not the same, though as Harvard Law School has currently only one tenured minority woman . . . Elizabeth Warren who is Native American.
hecking with the relevant tribe to see how that body defines membership.
That part I don't buy at all. Just because a tribe, for whatever political reasons, draws a line at 1/16, doesn't mean somebody should be made to feel ashamed for taking pride in their 1/32.
157: you really don't have to know me to know what I meant, because I said it, using real words, twice.
I suppose I could figure it out, but that would require work, and I don't really want to start digging through her cultural appropriation drawer
Like I said, I've never cared enough to do any real digging
Both of those comments were written before MHPH's.
All of which sometimes leaves me a little bit uncomfortable about Elizabeth Warren, though I've never actually been able to figure out if she ticked boxes for preferential treatment (I suppose I could figure it out, but that would require work, and I don't really want to start digging through her cultural appropriation drawer).
I'm comfortable saying that this stretches over into giving undue credit to a right wing smear job, in a way that reinforces it. Not looking into it is fine, but taking obvious liars to be raising serious questions about her, and saying that you're left uncomfortable by their accusations really is helping to reinforce right wing attacks on her.
153 - The thing about that is that Warren really can't be implicated in Harvard's doing that, since she wasn't involved (and apparently didn't know they'd done it).
I can't find the original 12 Years a Slave post, but this article at a disreputable newspaper has an image of it.
Here's my view: if people think you're Native, and you know they think you're Native, and you know that the impression that you're Native may have helped you materially*, and you don't know if you're actually Native, and you want to act in the most upright fashion, you need to figure out if you're Native and then correct the record if you're not.
* Or probably even helped you accrue cultural capital.
I still have no idea if Warren did anything wrong, by the way, because I've never looked into the details of her story.
Assuming that 166 is to 161, I'm not saying that she should be vilified. I'll vote for her if she's ever on my ballot.
I think, though, that it's a little implausible to say that she was completely unaware that whatever story she'd told about her ancestry was getting twisted into 'EW is Native' when the truth, as she understood it, was that a distant ancestor -- one person alive two centuries ago -- had been Native.
taking obvious liars to be raising serious questions about her, and saying that you're left uncomfortable by their accusations
I'm not taking the liars seriously. I don't know why you're saying that. In fact, I've taken conversations that I've been part of, conversations among people of good faith, seriously enough to be made uncomfortable by what they've* said, but not so seriously that I've wanted to look into the details**. Which is to say, I've discounted the liars appropriately. And here, again, is where you're reading things into what I've said. Stop being such an uncharitable dick, please.
* I won't name names. But I will, if you want, give you more context.
** Because digging around in Warren's story doesn't interest me all that much.
Moreover, what you've said in this thread seems to be far more damning than what I've heard in the past. Has she explicitly said she didn't know that Harvard was claiming her as a minority? And what about the Association of American Law Schools?
168: what if they think you're First Nations? Or Inuit?
Like Carp, I'll vote for her if I ever have the chance. She's one of my favorite political figures in the world at the moment, which is precisely why I'm so pissed off by the charge that I'm repeating the right's smears.
Now I'm curious about the more context.
I mean, what I know about the story is just the public stuff: Warren's name appeared on the Harvard listing of minority professors; her basis for that claim is somewhere between extraordinarily weak and non-existent; but despite a whole lot of interest from the right, who I have confidence would have found something if it were there, there's no sign that she ever got anything out of it. On that basis, the worst thing I can think about her is that when Harvard asked in some context, she answered "If you mean do I have any Native American ancestry, sure" without taking the issue seriously enough.
But you sound as if you have reason to think something worse.
My vague recollection is that Warren originally thought she was 1/16, but probably was something more like 1/32 or even 1/64. Hang her!
173: on the off chance that you're being serious, I'm using "Native" as a catch-all. And yes, I know that's problematic. So is "indigenous." I don't know, man. I try to be more careful in my work. But even there, it's hard to get it right.
I think I'll revert back to my theory in 43, that the distinction among ethnic/racial/gender identity boundaries you chose to police is basically a function of which alliances you've chosen in the various culture wars.
Carp and VW seem to have a lot invested in their alliance with Native Americans, whereas I don't. I appear to be quite a bit more lax on the policing as a result.
177.1: I thought you knew me better than that.
175: some Native American Studies scholars are pretty upset that Warren hasn't taken the issue seriously enough, yes. She's from Oklahoma and has excellent politics; she should know how important questions of cultural appropriation are. This is something that I've heard often enough through the years, including after the most recent NAISA meeting*, that it's made an impression. The members of NAISA are not right wingers. At all.
* I also heard that she's repeated the claim of Native ancestry in a recent book. Again, I have absolutely no idea if this is true. I really don't care enough about her case to bother checking.
175.1 - I think it's more that that happened before she was Harvard, when the Association of American Law Schools asked. (She says that she was interested in connecting with other people with a similar background to what she (at least thought) she had, but that it didn't end up happening. It turns out they just list people as "minority" without specifying anything.) Penn indicated at some point that she was, but it was something like "printed her name in bold typeface in some list" level stuff. And at some point Harvard pointed at her in defense of their diversity, though not with her knowledge.
The issue first appeared when Scott Brown's campaign started yelling about it, accusing her (without, obviously, any evidence) of getting preferential treatment as a result, having gotten a leg up on other applicants to teach at Harvard (despite there being none) as a result of it, and so on. There was about as much here's-smoke-questions-remain in the press as you'd expect to see when a republican candidate throws something like this at a democratic candidate, with long articles about whether or not she was really native american, how native american was she, and so on, all of them ending with a quick "but there's no evidence whatsoever that she received any kind of preferential treatment or even that this was something people noticed at the time" for balance.
175 She listed herself a minority faculty member in the AALS directories for years before joining the faculty at Harvard. Because she believed herself to be part Native.
178: again, I don't care if people believe the stories they've heard from their grandparents. I also don't care if people think they're Native. I care if they appropriate Native identity for material* gain.
* And as I said above, I think, but I'm much less certain here (and not willing to hash it out right now), that I also care if they appropriate Native identity in order to accrue cultural capital.
I think the 'material gain' front, she should be regarded as cleared. If there were anything concrete to be said against her in that regard, someone on the right would have turned it up.
"Cultural capital" is different, and if you want to think ill of her in that regard, you know much more about the issues than I do.
There's a whispered-about tale in my family history, the gist of which is that a great-great(-great?) grandfather back in Ireland was the offspring of an extra-marital affair, but the husband/non-biological father never knew or looked the other way and raised the boy as his own.
The story makes me wonder if we have some other ancestry that we don't know about, but who am I kidding? It was probably just another Irish guy named Michael. Or Patrick. Or Michael Patrick.
She listed herself a minority faculty member in the AALS directories for years before joining the faculty at Harvard.
Yeah, this is sort of what I thought happened, and I remain uncomfortable about it. Unless there's more to the story, which I genuinely believe there might be, I can understand why NAS scholars are upset about her actions. I think what she did was, read most charitably, careless in a not-okay way. And without knowing the details, which I imagine are unknowable, it's easy to read this less less charitably, as an effort to gain some material advantage. And by the way, this seems like a case of someone "ticking a box," but maybe people mean something else when they use that phrase. Despite what Spike says, I'm not invested enough in policing cultural identity that I've ever bothered to figure any of this stuff out.
178 I think promoting diversity, I guess especially for the benefit of Natives, but also for other historically oppressed peoples, is a positive good. I don't think hiring Ms. Dolezal or Sen. Warren are positive steps towards that goal.
176 The dispute isn't that it should be 1/64, but that it should be 0.
Obviously it is often the case that diversity considerations affect hiring outcomes without paperwork documenting it. I think every diversity-involving hire I've been in on has had exactly zero formal record of "race/gender officially played a role here." We report pool numbers to the administration, but that's about it.
I think the 'material gain' front, she should be regarded as cleared. If there were anything concrete to be said against her in that regard, someone on the right would have turned it up.
I'm not understanding why you're saying this. A scholar who identifies as Native American potentially has a lot to gain materially. Is the timing important here? Am I missing some relevant detail?
189: potentially, yes, but you're taking the hypothetical as true when there's actual evidence otherwise.
potentially, yes, but you're taking the hypothetical as true when there's actual evidence otherwise
I'm not following you. People thought she was Native, didn't they? Certainly Harvard did, or they wouldn't have listed her in that way. Given that impression, which she apparently* didn't correct, how is there "actual evidence" that she didn't benefit, materially, as a scholar?
* Again, I have idea here.
188 - Except at least with Harvard the people involved are on record saying that not only wasn't it an issue it wasn't even mentioned at any point in the process. And it's not listed on employment documents from her first position either (at Texas). It might have been on employment documents at Penn, but I don't know if anyone has found anything more than the bit where they referred to her as a minority on an awards list (which actually was shortly before she stopped being listed as a minority on the AALS list). So the story has to involve a weird conspiracy of secretive plotting at that point, especially if she's supposed to be involved in it in any way.
I'm not getting what you mean in terms of 'a lot to gain materially', probably because I'm not an academic. But I can think of two things -- hiring preference, and people taking your work more seriously because of your position of cultural authority. The first? I suppose it can't be absolutely ruled out, but there seems to be no evidence at all for it, and it just doesn't seem likely. The second seems absolutely implausible given her field -- Native American ancestry doesn't give you any cultural capital talking about bankruptcy. Someone in your area making a badly founded claim of NA ancestry might get something professional out of it, but not in hers.
From your point of view, what am I missing?
It's not unusual for a provost's office to have money that they can use to fund underrepresented hires. I'm guessing that's not what happened here, but when it does presumably there's something official written down at some point.
Again: "even though there's no evidence of it whatsoever and it looks like nothing is there it's also true that there's no demonstrable proof to the contrary, so it's conceivably possible and therefore there's something worrying here" is exactly the sort of "questions remain" bullshit that right wing smear jobs use to perpetuate claims they've made up.
196: Is it irresponsible to speculate? It would be irresponsible not to.
Someone in your area making a badly founded claim of NA ancestry might get something professional out of it, but not in hers.
Why do you say this? I honestly don't understand why you and Josh are making the claims you're making. If people thought Warren was Native -- and Harvard apparently did -- that would potentially have led to material gain for her. Also: she would have known this, which leads me back to what I said earlier.
196: I'm sorry I didn't like Mad Max as much as you did.
If people thought Warren was Native -- and Harvard apparently did -- that would potentially have led to material gain for her.
If we had no other information about the situation, I would totally agree with you. But it's been years since the issue came up and there's been no evidence at all that it *did* lead to material gain, despite people with lots of motivation digging for it. We do have other information, which is why you're getting the response you're getting.
I'm explicitly breaking apart hiring and people evaluating her work. I can't imagine why anyone looking at bankruptcy law would care about the author's NA ancestry, and I find it actively implausible that they would.
Preferential hiring? I don't know academia, I can't rule anything out, but my recollection of what's been said is what MHPH said -- everyone in a position to know has denied that it was a factor.
If there's anything else possible in terms of material gain, I'm missing it.
If they didn't think that when they hired her, it's really not at all clear to me what kind of "material gain" she could possibly have gotten out of it. If the provost were paying 75% of her salary, someone would have turned that up by now.
You're ignoring 188, which is fine, and also 168, which is also fine. As long as you don't actually put words in my mouth, I'm totally cool with you thinking I'm wrong about this. Again, I'm not deeply invested enough to keep arguing about it. I am, though, pretty deeply invested in not being accused of parroting the right's talking points.
200 I understand your position on this. This issue is intensely tribal, though, and the people with actual knowledge have all the incentive to keep it to themselves. Not just because they support her, but also because it's kind of embarrassing to have touted her Native identity on such a thin reed, even if her story had proven out.
This isn't evidence at all that she got some sort of material gain. (Or, what concerns me more, that her employers slacked off on their duty to diversify because they already has a minority faculty member.) But I think it absolutely goes to the point about the people with motivation to dig for damaging information.
So when you say "material gain" you specifically mean "preference in hiring"? So if the evidence suggested (and I haven't dug into it either) that they didn't know about this claim at that time, then you'd be satisfied?
It's pretty implausible to me that there aren't any conservative faculty at the law school who would be happy to have leaked info about hiring preferences had they happened.
I mean do you really think the Harvard law faculty consists only of people who voted for Warren and support affirmative action?
Okay, I think I finally understand (and if what I'm about to say is right, VW, FL? Seriously, this is very confusing for non-academics, and I swear I wasn't being uncharitable, I legitimately couldn't figure out what you were talking about.)
Premise 1: Colleges are influenced by diversity in hiring, but they're both secretive and kind of stupid about it. It is completely plausible that they would look at a blonde from Oklahoma who appeared on a list of minority professors because of claimed Native American ancestry, and would hire her preferentially for diversity's sake without looking into what she meant by that claim at all. (This is the premise I was missing, for real.) But any kind of preferential hiring along those lines would be likely to be completely off the record.
Premise 2: Premise 1 is common knowledge in academia. Anyone going for an academic job should be presumed to know it to be true.
Therefore, by claiming herself as Native American on the ALS list of professors, Warren should be understood to have knowingly made it likely that a college would preferentially hire her. There's no evidence one way or the other that it did happen, but there wouldn't be evidence if it had happened, and she was responsible for not creating the conditions for it to happen. She's morally in the wrong for creating the risk that someone would quietly affirmative-action-hire her, and it's not even implausible that what she did is the kind of thing someone might do in the hopes of that effect -- that she might get preference without having to actively lie in an explicit employment context.
Is that what you're thinking? Because if I'm right, now that I've got it straight, it's not nuts. It's just the first premise that threw me.
207;8:Behold: the head of the appointment committee that recommended her for the position at Harvard.
How would other faculty know? The committee members yes, faculty in general...I don't know how HLS does its hires but it's big enough that they wouldn't all be deliberating together at the relevant stage of the process, I'd guess
209 is good enough for government work. I would quibble with some of the assertions therein, but it's accurate enough in broad strokes that it's not worth trouble.
When I say "accurate enough," I mean an accurate enough approximation of what I'm thinking might have happened, as distinct from what actually happened, which I believe is unknowable, that it's good enough for government work.
I think lack of diverse origins kept me from getting a tenure track position. Either that or the lack of a PhD.
they're both secretive and kind of stupid about it
This applies to so very many things in life.
I should be very, very clear about something: I don't believe that anything I've said in this thread should be construed as undermining the quality of Warren's scholarly work. I don't know anything about her work, but I'm told quite reliably that it's excellent. Moreover, I don't want some asshole misreading what I've written here as an attack on affirmative action or other efforts to diversify the faculties of colleges or universities. All I'm saying is that I remain uncomfortable about the charges of cultural appropriation that I've heard leveled at Warren, who, despite those charges, I admire as a political figure. And I'm uncomfortable about those charges on exactly the grounds that I've stated, and no grounds other than those.
This is all a bit too close to home for me. I'm not going to ask anyone to redact or erase my comments, but I do want to be very clear about how narrow my misgivings are, the point of origin of those misgivings, and how little I know about the substance of the various claims people make about Warren's ostensible cultural appropriation.
I don't know anything about her work, but I'm told quite reliably that it's excellent.
You haven't been listening to Jamie Dimon, then.
I thought I already said that I had discounted the claims of liars.
Tangentially related to the OT: Is there an inoffensive, or at least less offensive, term for redneck? I don't think so, but it's the subject of recent debate. "White trash" is the worst of all to me.
222: "Honky-ass motherfucker" doesn't really qualify, does it?
Well, what are you trying to convey? Rural, right-wing, white Southerners? That's longer, but I think inoffensive.
Rednecks don't have to be southerners.
209: premise one really does work that way in some cases, as odd as it might sound. I knew of one candidate's ethnic identity only because a (single) letter-writer mentioned it, and certainly it came up in the hiring discussion. (I don't think it changed the outcome.) In another case, we had some circumstantial evidence that a candidate might be in an underrepresented group-- actually pretty similar to the Warren-AALS thing-- and we used that, along with the kitchen sink, in discussions with the administration. But there was never any other evidence of identity status in either case and there would be no record of any of this except that I'm stupid enough to make this comment.
222: "White Trash" is the absolute worst. First there's calling people trash, and second there's the implication that they are different because trash is ordinarily non-white. It's classist and racist. All that's missing is a little misogyny and we'd have the trifecta.
"Rural" might work in the same sense that "urban" has come to mean inner city African American. Also "white trash" and "redneck" don't fully overlap for me. The latter implies farm boys, while the former invokes trailer parks and meth.
We're down in Galveston in an area known by some as the redneck Riviera. (Self-selected as far as I known, so fine by me.)
225: More or less.
I buy it if you say it can work that way, it just legitimately would not have occurred to me at all, for someone whose significant identity wasn't obvious.
I found this worthwhile to read to clarify some of my thinking related to what Spkes says in 43:
https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2015/06/13/daniel-silvermint-on-how-we-talk-about-passing/
It's interesting that we're much more comfortable policing self-identifications when we believe that we've caught someone passing in an inappropriate or social progress-undermining direction. We're guarding against trespass, but unlike those who want to draw very strict boundaries around the category 'white' in order to reserve and preserve privilege, policing who counts as a member of an historically and/or currently oppressed group can serve good ends, such as correctly allocating resources and reparations. And we can have perfectly good reasons for policing those categories in everyday life, like wanting the solidarity of genuinely shared experience, or endeavoring to be an ally to disadvantaged groups. But I'm not sure we should be so comfortable.
Consider the category 'disabled'. There are certainly commendable, appropriate motivations for unilaterally policing claims of disability. If we see someone park in a reserved spot, and then walk away without apparent difficulty, then we might assume that we're seeing a despicable cheat, someone who's consuming resources or opportunities that are meant to help others, and who is insensitive to the burdens others face. But the markers we tend to use to identify disabled and non-disabled persons are as imperfect as all the other markers we've discussed. Notably, relying on whether someone looks or acts disabled leaves out individuals with invisible disabilities, such as mental illness, chronic pain, intermittent impairment, concealed prosthetics, and so on. Walking away from a reserved parking spot without apparent difficulty is not reliable evidence, but when we shake our heads or worse, challenge the individual in question or reprimand her, we are once again engaged in social construction. We are determining who counts as what on the basis of largely arbitrary stereotypes. And the same is true of looking at a photograph of a seemingly white woman and assuming that we've been deceived. There are good reasons to police boundaries, but there are good reasons to be careful when we do.
That last line seems off. He's advocating for way too much skepticism or "let's wait and see" about the facts of this women's story. People aren't just looking at her photographs and making judgments about her based on racial stereotypes, unless there is no such things as a judgment of what race someone is other than through an application of stereotypes. Everything that counts as being "racialized as white" seems to be true of her family background, and that's what the photographs are reinforcing.
Redneck isn't always considered a pejorative either. Some people wear the title proudly.
We're down in Galveston in an area known by some as the redneck Riviera.
They're going to have to fight the Florida panhandle for the title.
I'm much more familiar with Redneck Riviera being applied to the Alabama/West Florida panhandle beach areas. But having been a somewhat frequent visitor to the beaches between Galveston and Freeport back in the day I can appreciate the sentiment. If God didn;t want you to drive on baeches why did he make them flat?
236 sure is true in Central Pennsylvania/the part of Appalachia I call home.
Small town American in the city streets, redneck in the central PA Sheetz.
I've driven on beaches a couple times. Still trying to wash that sin off my hands.
239 reminds me that the honors program at my sainted alma mater just sent me another letter this week begging for money. I should give to Harvard instead.
Oh Sheetz, how I miss you.
I'm coming around to the contentious position that Wawa is superior to Sheetz. I used to prefer Sheetz, but they always seem to have a surprisingly long line.
Wawa is so much better than Sheetz that it's silly, and Josh should obviously give his money to the history department.
Redneck isn't always considered a pejorative either. Some people wear the title proudly
Right. It's an insider/outsider thing.
With my encyclopedic knowledge of PA off of 80, I can tell you that the Wawa at the Blakeslee exit is A+++.
Wawa has a history department? Whoa.
252: embrace the cross-platform synergies, noob.
252: They concentrate on this history of water, written for children.
"the", not "this". Sadly, I have no history of water for children to link to.
Sure, everyone just ignore Turkey Hill...
240 is really great.
My in-laws have a neighbor who takes the family to dinner at Sheetz for a treat. Which I think would be a nice, but not brief, way to describe what 222 is wanting.
Redneck Riviera
Washington's Long Beach Peninsula is a sort of low-rent Cape Cod that hosts both beach driving and innumerable garage sales, but I call it "Methampton".
Wawa's ordering system UI is trash compared to Sheetz's. I do like their coffee and will probably get some tomorrow. (I'm only a few miles from what I think is the only location where a Sheetz and a Wawa are down the street from each other. ) Their hoagies are pretty good, but I have a soft spot for Sheetz's burgers.
I always thought Myrtle Beach was the Redneck Riviera.
When I google "redneck riviera", all of the first hits identify it as the Florida panhandle.
263: I have relatives there, and they'd either call it that or the more marketable name of the "Emerald Coast".
When I hear Wawa, I think of the Beatles.
261 gets it right. Sheetz's ordering system is magic.
235 -- Like all analogies, it's a bad one, but parents talking about their child's race is a lot closer to a doctor talking about someone's disabilities than some passerby who sees someone getting out of a car doing so.
I may be a bad Pennsylvanian. I've never actually been inside a Sheetz.
The system they use for ordering gasoline seems about the same as anywhere else.
I spent enough time spelling Scheetz in the 90s to declare myself an honorary Pennsylvanian.
Sheetz had much fewer locations in the 90s. Scheetz may not have had any.
I strongly doubt that Warren's semi-claimed American Indian heritage had anything whatsoever to do with her being hired at Harvard. She was probably the most famous bankruptcy scholar in the country at that point and certainly the most famous liberal one, and law schools desperately need bankruptcy teachers. Hiring her was an absolute no brainer for any school. The HLS faculty was also famously contentious at about that time, and had a share of hardcore conservatives, so I really would be shocked if she was hired in part based on a false apprehension that she'd be a valuable diversity hire and yet somehow that hasn't come out. It's much more plausible to me that she could have benefited at some earlier point in her career, except that I think the record is that before she went to Penn she never self-identified as Native American or asked for that to be a factor in her hiring, so my understanding is that it played no even arguable role in her career until she was an already famous bankruptcy scholar. I do think that it likely benefited Harvard (or Penn) to some extent by allowing them to slightly game their statistics about professors of color, possibly for AALS purposes or recruiting. But I don't think that in fact there's a plausible case that the claim materially benefitted Elizabeth Warren personally
269: this needs to be rectified. Road trip!
Checking, she was at Texas, not Georgetown, before going to Penn (don't know where I'd gotten Georgetown). But she was already at Penn and a superstar full professor in an in-demand field before there was ever even any arguable reliance on a claim of native american heritage, so the odds that this materially benefited her in hiring (or in advancement) just isn't that plausible.
273: and now I feel like I should say 100% clearly that I have no way of knowing one way or the other whether the people doing the hiring at Harvard considered Warren's cultural heritage before offering her a job, but I don't particularly doubt your assertion that they probably didn't. And yet, I still stand by 168. If a person knows that s/he may benefit materially* from claiming membership in a Native American community, that person needs to be very sure about her or his heritage, and also about the rules that the Native American community in question uses to determine membership, before s/he makes such a claim or allows such a claim to be made on her or his behalf.
** Or maybe otherwise.
275: I might have to go to DC soon.
Without reading the thread, I must always side with CCarp on all things genealogical.
Redneck Riviera is definitely the Florida panhandle, not anything by Galveston.
278: I sometimes stop at the one in Bedford, but since you'll already have to go through the pit that is Breezewood you might want to just stop at the one there. Hard to get out of that parking lot, though.
I think it's reasonable to say that she should have been more vigilant and thoughtful about not checking the box for the AALS form that reported her as Native American. But, I don't think (a) that there's any evidence that it was intentionally a move to gain some affirmative action preference, or (b) even that she should have reasonably anticipated that checking the box *might* have given her some kind of preference in faculty hiring. At that point in her career, it just wasn't true. In any event there's no evidence that she in fact tried to use a claim of Native American heritage to in fact obtain any job (whether at a university or in government) and no evidence that she in fact benefited from a perception of her as a native american. If it's a sin, it's a pretty venial one.
There's vague hints in family history that some of my Central European ancestors may have been Jewish and assimilated in the 19th century (my guess is they were in the Hapsburg part of partitioned Poland and became basically Christian). I haven't verified this* but if I ever do, I'm still not going to identify myself as Jewish.
*But there does seem to have been an effort to not mention the Polish ancestry. For many years my dad didn't know my grandmother's mom was from Poland.
This article goes as far as to suggest that after working at Texas (where she didn't list herself as native american) there are very, very good reasons to believe that her ethnicity had absolutely nothing to do with her career advancement, to the extent that her leaving for the University of Pennsylvania was generally seen as an achievement for the university. Given that it's hard to see where any career benefit could have fit in the first place.
And as far as I know, as well, her claims topped out at self identifying as having native american heritage, but never rose to claiming tribal membership. There is I think at least some space between those two, and it's pretty clear that her family members thought that there were than vague hints about a possible ancestor (perhaps wrongfully, but then you're getting into 'shouldn't she have assumed her grandparents were lying to her about her heritage' stuff.)
284: If you descend from them via your father, you're not Jewish anyway.
The day she learned that HLS was relying on her Native status to respond to criticism that it wasn't aggressive enough about seeking out and hiring minority faculty she should have called the various people in the HLS admin and told them she wasn't Native enough to count for that purpose. Maybe she did, I don't know.
I don't care if she benefited personally: that's an election question, and I'd vote for her pretty much no matter what the state of facts are about this issue. The important question, to me, is was anyone harmed. Answer: we don't know what sort of hiring initiatives HLS would have felt compelled to undertake -- and I'm not talking about her position, but whatever the next few were after 98 or so -- to actually become at least as diverse as they were saying they were.
And what they were saying was a gross distortion of what EW believed to be the state of the facts, which was itself something of a good faith misunderstanding of the actual state of the facts. She's at last somewhat complicit, though: the mistake HLS made is too similar to the mistake EW made in calling herself a minority faculty member to be coincidence. It is completely ridiculous -- worse, it's one drop thinking -- to say "EW is Native American." I can't imagine that anyone reading these words would check a box on any form for any purpose with as loose a claim as she had. In the 1990s.
286: But I thought it was my call!
The day she learned that HLS was relying on her Native status to respond to criticism that it wasn't aggressive enough about seeking out and hiring minority faculty
She claims, how plausibly I don't know but maybe at least somewhat plausibly, to not have known that until she began campaigning for the Senate and the issue came up.
289 -- 15 years after the issue came up in print. I guess I would believe that a law professor would be clueless enough, generally, to miss her own name in print on an issue of active discussion, that no one (faculty or student) would ask her about it having seen it in print, and that a law school administration would be clueless enough that no one would ask her about it before touting her, or thinking about what they should be doing to hire a diverse faculty.
No, I would totally believe that.
I don't remember the details there -- was HLS specifically identifying her as a reason they didn't need to hire more minority candidates? Like, back when Bell was doing his protest? I hadn't recalled that at all.
Given that Warren already had a reputation for not getting involved in debates that weren't directly part of her research interests, especially social-liberal-v-conservatives ones, I don't see any problem with believing that something a Harvard spokesperson said in response to a criticism regarding minority representation* wouldn't be something that would stand out to her. I don't even see how this would count as "clueless".
I mean, in small grad programs where everyone absolutely knows each other and gossips all the time I could still see something like this going unnoticed by everyone, so unless law schools are really, really weird then why would that be strange?
*Which was in fact an issue she had already notably avoided getting involved in at Penn.
Also come on, if you have to posit exaggerated counter-examples like "but if they hadn't successfully hired her maybe a bunch of years later they would have felt just a little more pressure to hire a minority candidate that they otherwise wouldn't have instead of, in the face of that exact pressure, since they had to defend themselves by pointing to a one-person-smaller group of professors and that tiny extra bit was the tipping point that would have created a different structural effort to promote minority candidates" as evidence of a possible but unknown harm you might as well start bringing "and also North Korea decided to invade the United States so the minority professor who would have been hired ended up dying because they were living on the west coast not the east" into the picture.
There's vague hints in family history that some of my Central European ancestors may have been Jewish and assimilated in the 19th century (my guess is they were in the Hapsburg part of partitioned Poland and became basically Christian). I haven't verified this* but if I ever do, I'm still not going to identify myself as Jewish.
I've been restraining the "YOU GUYS, MY GRANDPA" angle to faked ethnicities.
But my mom more-or-less thinks I'm Rachel Dolezal with respect to Judaism, which is a little incoherent given that I am not active in any sense, and have about the same intensity of identification as my father. I feel Jewish enough to feel insulted when it's implied that I'm not (or barely) Jewish, at least.
294 -- No I meant that I believe that she could miss it all.
295 -- HLS should not have been touting her as a Native American. She isn't one. They didn't make it up; they ran with a story that they got, maybe indirectly, from her. Your analogy is ridiculous. Minority outreach is (or is supposed to be) a big deal in academia. The admin was using her bogus status to say that their compliance was better than it was. As to whether anyone was injured, I say "we don't know" but that doesn't make it ok to have been misrepresenting her status or their compliance.
292 -- not really, no. Apparently (post-1995) a HLS administrator reported her as Native American on federally-filed forms, based on her (pre-1995) AALS filign. And there are some stray comments from the press person in the law school identifying her as a "native american" professor.
But, as you say LB, HLS hiring minority faculty was an extremely live, public controversy throughout the 1990s that was well known throughout law schools, led to litigation and public protests and was an intensely argued controversy. Aside from those stray incidents no one was using the presence of Elizabeth Warren to actually justify not hiring more minorities, nor is there any evidence that she promoted herself as a native american faculty member during those debates.
I mean, it was publicly known and well-reported, even in national newspapers, that Lani Guinier, whom Harvard hired in 1998, after Warren was hired in 1995, was the first ever minority woman on the Harvard faculty, and that her hiring was the result of at least 8-10 years of protest over an absence of minority faculty at Harvard during that time. Other than the stray press comment, there's no real evidence that people at Harvard were going around saying "oh no we don't need Guinier we already have a minority woman on the faculty." This was not a minor or non-public issue.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1996/10/22/survey-diversity-lacking-at-hls-pa/
That should be Harvard *Law* faculty.
300 -- right. That stray statement, from the guy who was the Law School's press officer, is the only real thing anyone has been able to point to. But, this was a live and public debate and basically other than that guy there's no evidence at all that Warren's presence on the faculty was used as an argument against the hiring of minority women, or that she was in fact perceived by the school to have filled that slot.
I'm pretty sure a quoted line from a spokesperson in the middle of an article in the Harvard Crimson does actually count as a "stray press comment". From what I know there's that example, there's another Crimson article which mentions it as an aside at some point, and there's a letter to the editor in the NYT by that same spokesman saying something similar later on and that's it. I'm pretty certain there could be twice that many examples at that level about myself, or you, without either of us noticing, especially if it was in the context of a debate neither of us were involving ourselves in.
From the NYT, at the time Guinier was hired in 1998, three years after they hired Warren:
299: Yeah, that's what I was thinking of. At the time Warren was hired, it was an accepted public fact that there weren't any minority women on the HLS faculty in any meaningful sense, and there wasn't any serious attempt to claim her as a resolution of that controversy.
To reconcile all this, you have to believe she thought "Absolutely, I have NA heritage, and if people want to keep track of that publicly that's not inappropriate," and "Obviously, I'm not a minority in the sense that people are upset at HLS for not hiring minority women." This seems like a perfectly plausible state of mind -- maybe a culpable one, but not at all unlikely.
||
230: "Rural" might work in the same sense that "urban" has come to mean inner city African American.
Interesting perception in a thread about Rachel Dolezal
No, I think rurals and the Fox News crowd views "urban" differently and more accurately than that. The inner core of cities (Dallas is an example) are the white UMC gentrification areas, and the blacks and other poor minorities (who partly service the professional crowd) are in a ring of older "suburbs" surround the developed core. Manhattan; Brooklyn and Queens.
So why does the white (or mixed) UMC professional demographic want to either render itself invisible or identify with black culture of oppression by claiming it has no place in the "urban?" Maybe Dolezal has more to teach us than we thought.
|>
307 sounds like what she was most likely thinking.
Given how little I knew about the particulars before this conversation, I think 307 is totally possible. Having said that, I do wonder if, as I heard recently, she reiterates the claim of Native American heritage in a new(ish) book. Does anyone know the answer to that?
Although if MHPH agrees with 207, then I think it's the worst and most horrible thing that's ever been written. In the meantime, I'm going to try to figure out if she says anything about her Cherokee granny in A Fighting Change.
Yup, there is it. No wonder the people I talked to were pissed. What the fuck?
311: "207" should be "307", right? Otherwise I'm really lost.
Also the first of 307's thoughts, if taken seriously, would absolutely explain it showing up in her book. I don't know of any occasion where she applied for membership in a tribe or anything, or even said she was qualified for that, but it does seem like she takes it to be part of her family history. If she suddenly disavowed it that would probably be way better evidence that it was a cynical attempt to gain an advantage.
you'll already have to go through the pit that is Breezewood
Breezewood still exists? How has it not yet been smote from the face of the Earth?
p. 9 "His parent's bitterly opposed the match because my mother's family was part Native American and that was a big dividing line in those days."
311: Why would she write a book about menopause?
I made that s possessive. That's on me, not her.
On p. 262, she writes about the debate with Brown, notes that he said that at both Penn and Harvard "she checked the box claiming she was a Native American" [I guess this is the talking point MHPH thought I was parroting?]. Then on the next page, 263, she writes, "So I stood my ground. I talked about my family. I made clear I never sought any advantages, and I pointed out that the people who had hired me had all verified my account -- 100 percent."
I can't figure out what that means. Do any of you know?
315: Of course, that could be true whether or not they were right to believe her mother's family was Native American.
315 -- isn't she explaining that this was her understanding based on family lore? I don't have the book but based on googling what she says is ""Everyone on our mother's side -- aunts, uncles, and grandparents -- talked openly about their Native American ancestry," "My brothers and I grew up on stories about our grandfather building one-room schoolhouses and about our grandparents' courtship and their early lives together in Indian Territory."
I don't think she's actually claiming tribal membership or status as a minority, so do you think she's just making all of that up and straight-up lying about the stories she was told?
The "account" pretty clearly refers back to her claims about her heritage, I think. Even being extra charitable, I can't come up with anything else that makes sense. So she's saying the people who hired her verified a claim that, I've learned in this thread (and had heard previously), is almost certainly false. And definitely nobody was talking about it either Harvard or Penn, right?
From my part of the peanut gallery, I'm agreeing with VW and Carp here on NA & EW. I'm sure there's sociology literature on these membership issues, but, lacking the energy to find it, this discussion has been helpful to me.
321 seems like a very strained reading, but maybe I'm being uncharitable. By the time this book was written, the controversy was already a controversy. And yet, rather than saying, "My family talked about the fact that we had Native American ancestors, but that's probably not the case..." she states it as though it's a fact. Again, I'm happy to be told I'm wrong.
I'd assume that her account meant that she was a basically white person who believed that she had some native american ancestry and wasn't claiming to actually be a native american for affirmative action purposes and hadn't in the past so claimed.
322: I don't understand what 'verified' means there, and can't match it up to anything public.
325: then why didn't she say that? Again, by the time the book was written, this was all hugely controversial. But she writes about her Native heritage as a given. That seems totally dissonant to me, but I might just think that because of the conversations I've overheard.
I think it's perfectly plausible not only that sje grew up believing that she had native american ancestry, but that people in her parents' generation believed that her family had native american ancestry (and did things like opposing a marriage based on that belief) even though the ancestry was, based on published records (which as you know may or may not be perfect) somewhat distant.
That's quite different than claiming that she's a member of a tribe, which she doesn't and hasn't, or claiming that she's actually a "native american" for purposes of hiring or affirmative action or job seeking or being represented somewhere, which she also clearly hasn't.
Again, I'd assume "verified" means that, in the past, people looked into the fact that she had not been claiming NA status for hiring purposes, even though she believed she had NA ancestry, and had verified that. That's something a hiring committee could verify. I'm not sure how else to have it make sense.
But I don't have the book, you do, so maybe there's some context that I'm missing from the sentence you quote.
I'm actually really mystified by the fact that we're still in the 'almost certainly false' position. There's an identified person in the 19th century who the unsubstantiated marriage application applies to. That's not evidence that whoever it was was Cherokee, but it's obviously not evidence that she wasn't. But there are a whole lot of genealogists out there, and they know a name and a date and a place -- I would think that someone would have got interested and actually settled it by now.
326: she uses that word (see the bolded text in 319). I have no earthly idea what she's talking about. And she doesn't say in the book. She goes on to attack Brown for being a jerk and hating the poor. (NB: Brown is a jerk and hates the poor.)
Is there anything between page 262 and 263 that provides any more context?
330: again, I'm out of my depth here, because I've never done any research into any of this until right now. But the people I know who are unhappy about Warren's ostensible cultural appropriation say the research has been done, and that she has no legitimate claim* to Native heritage. Actually, I thought Carp said something similar upthread, but I might have misread him. Having written all of that, I should add that the people I'm talking about are very invested in policing these boundaries, particularly in an academic context, so I don't know what to think.
I also feel the need to keep saying that I never really cared enough about this controversy, before this conversation, to have anything other than mild feelings of discomfort about Warren's claims. I mean, I never looked into any of it before tonight. Now, though, because of MHPH, I'm sending huge checks to Scott Walker's campaign.
* What does this mean? I don't know. Which is to say, I don't know what standard they were using.
332: no, I'm afraid not. Also, I'm just using the preview function on google books. You can check for yourself really easily.
293: I suspected as much but went ahead with the comment anyway.
319: um, she's talking about responding to accusations that she got special treatment, yeah? When she says " I made clear I never sought any advantages, and I pointed out that the people who had hired me had all verified my account -- 100 percent."?
The "people who hired me had all verified my account" is in all the news articles, namely, it's the people involved in hiring decisions* saying "no you jerks we didn't hire her because of that we never even took it into consideration"
Also: given that her campaign adopted a (wise) policy of "that's not important let's focus on something else" approach to the issue, and the fact that lots of people have somenative american heritage, especially in OK, I'm not seeing why you're so assured that it's clearly true that she doesn't.** Her family believed they did, if there was actual evidence to the contrary we certainly would have seen it. The situation we're in is just that it's family knowledge and there's a sense of heritage there but no one is asserting tribal membership. So even if she doesn't have any there's no reason to think she should have suddenly, in the face of basically no evidence suddenly started thinking that what she was raised to think about her family was false.
*Especially, like I linked above, Charles Fried who was actually actively on the other side of the minority representation debate at the time, and who, to me, sounds super irritated about being asked in the (text) quotations.
**"Can't prove it genealogically" is the standard for claiming tribal membership, sure, but there's plenty of people out there with some but either not enough to count or in cases where there's no hard evidence, or both, who still claim a connection. It seems plausible enough that she could be in that group.
I would think that someone would have got interested and actually settled it by now.
I think this gives too much credit to what genealogy is and is not able to settle. The farther you go back, the more difficult it is to determine things with certainty.
338: I guess -- you think that's the status of knowledge? The relevant person, there's no record of her parentage one way or the other? Charley probably knows where to look to see if that's true.
there's plenty of people out there with some but either not enough to count or in cases where there's no hard evidence, or both, who still claim a connection
I'm not sure how many times I have to say that the people doing this are a-okay in my book, so long as they're not doing it in such a way or in such a context that they might believe it's possible they'll gain materially* as a result of their half-baked claims. You seem to think Warren had no reason to believe she might gain materially or otherwise from these claims.** I think you're wrong, but I can't prove that and have no interest in trying to do so.
* Or perhaps accrue culture capital.
** Which were or weren't half-baked. I don't know.
I think if you look at page 240 of the book it supports the reading in comments 329 and 336 above of the passage from page 263 (i.e., that what the hiring committee "verified" was that Warren had never sought an advantage for hiring purposes):
Republicans also accused me of using my background to get ahead, but that simply wasn't true. It wasn't a question of whether I could have sought advantage -- I just didn't. I never asked for special treatment when I applied to college, to law school, or for jobs. As the story broke and people dug through my background, ever place that hired me backed that up 100 percent -- including the Harvard hiring committee.
The parallel use of "100 percent" in particular seems telling to me. But I'm also just going from Google Books preview as well and have no knowledge of the underlying facts.
I do think it's really weird that Warren reiterated this claim uncritically in 2014. I don't have any idea what to make of that, but I still don't care enough to start speculating about her motives.
I'm fairly certain that there's at least one native american somewhere back in my family's history*. The only evidence for it is some very, very obviously native american people in the stash of family photos and the memory of the names of the people involved in the minds of my great-uncles and aunts (and maybe someone younger who's really into genealogy but who knows). If those pictures slipped behind the radiator it would be a matter of however long it took for those 90+ year old relatives to die off, which they've been doing recently, before it was hard to impossible to figure out barring a stroke of luck and some very dedicated research.
*Considered Mennonite-ly, which is to say, could totally be the second cousin of my great-great-uncle's father. And almost certainly is past the great-great-uncle mark. But there's an older obviously native american woman in some really old ones, and a younger ambiguously native american man that some of my great uncles remember (kind of, I think), and after that it's all swallowed up in a sea of german people.
340 seems right, for sure. I still don't know what to think about the passage I quoted in 315. Her Native heritage -- which either is or isn't nonsense -- is obviously a big enough deal to her that she still foregrounds it in a book written in 2014.
I do think it's really weird that Warren reiterated this claim uncritically in 2014.
It would suggest that she still believes the claim.
342: and if that happened, and a professional organization asked you if you identified as Native American -- not if you had some very distant relatives who maybe were Native Americans -- you should probably say no. Or that's what I'd advise you to do if you asked me.
344 seems right to me. But Halford was suggesting otherwise upthread.
339-first-*'ed-claim seems increasingly reasonable, especially since T"R"O pointed out that by the time that the first mention of this by Warren available to the people considering hiring her was well after she was an established big deal person in her area. I mean, (as per link I posted) if being stolen away by Penn was considered an achievement by them and she only checked that box after being hired* it's hard to see what the cynical motive would be. And, again, if she was operating from cynical motives rather than a sincere belief that this was part of her heritage she'd be way less likely to put it in her book now that the claim is controversial, instead of a brief "it turns out my family was mistaken about this oh well, but it (very obviously) didn't affect anything" sort of claim.
*And everyone involved very credibly denies it having played any role whatsoever.
Naive question, in the AALS thing did she check off a box saying she was (among others) Native American? Was this like the census where you check ad many as apply? I can quite understand Native Americans being upset by this. It isn't asking about ancestry, it is asking about how do you identify & belong. It would be similar to my claiming to be Irish. Most of my ancestors were Irish, but I am not. (I have heard that the Irish can get upset at these claims too.)
345: I don't really even identify as Mennonite, but if it had been (supposedly) closer and people had talked about it as a thing about the family (as opposed to the "oh look at that - that guy clearly wasn't all German Mennonite"), and I had something invested in my family history, which all seems to be true of Warren, then yeah, I'd think it would be possible to claim some native american ancestry, short of the amount involved in making a claim for tribal membership.
349 was, very obviously, me. It has been a bad day for my computer as far as remembering that field, apparently.
I'm curious now -- there's two separate issues: is it wrong for someone with as little NA ancestry as Warren claims to have had to identify herself as such in the manner that she did, if the claims were true and verifiable? And then how does the fact that they're at least unverifiable and plausibly wrong change that?
Because even if the claims were verifiable, I'd think it were bullshit for her to gain advantage from them on the basis of that little connection. I doubt she did -- like, I can now follow the argument, but it doesn't seem likely to me given her actual career.
The unverifiableness I'm not sure what to do with. If she wasn't getting anything material out of it, it doesn't seem clearly wrong to me to continue to believe plausible family history that hasn't been either proven or disproven (I think. Maybe it's been disproven, but I haven't seen that.) But it all comes down to advantage.
There's a chance I have Native American ancestry through the branch of my family that was Puritan; lots of questionable marriages/conversions back then. Haven't confirmed it, and even if I do it'll never be more than a curiosity.
I mean, in small grad programs where everyone absolutely knows each other and gossips all the time I could still see something like this going unnoticed by everyone, so unless law schools are really, really weird then why would that be strange?
That you think this means that we're coming at this from such different places that we've long since arrived at agree-to-disagree territory. In my world, nobody who claims Native heritage believes that word of that claim won't get around very quickly. And to be clear, my world isn't NAS; it's the social sciences and humanities at major research universities.
Add to that, Warren is from Oklahoma, where these issues are hashed out all the time. The idea that she casually mentioned that she was Native at some point, casually ticked a box saying she was Native on a survey or membership form, then pretty much forgot about it and thought it was no big deal until the Walker campaign brought it up, and then decided to mention it again in 2014 (but as not really that big deal, right?) seems like a weird reading to me.
But there you. Let's agree to disagree and not put words in each other's mouths.
But Halford was suggesting otherwise upthread.
No I wasn't. What I suggested was that she (a) believes that she has some native american background (that is, it is clear that she does believe this, as do members of her family), but (b) that she also doesn't self-identify as a native american for affirmative action or other purposes in which she might, as you seem insistent on insinuating (though without really any evidence), claim a personal advantage through being native american heritage. In other words, she identifies as a white person with some native american familial background, but hasn't claimed "native american" status or sought to personally or professionally benefit from a claim to being a minority, tribe member, native american, or anything other than a white woman.
I'd think it would be possible to claim some native american ancestry, short of the amount involved in making a claim for tribal membership
Right. We're coming at this from completely different places. That's totally okay. I have no problem with people disagreeing with me. Please just don't assume that our disagreement stems from my hearting Rush Limbaugh, okay?
354: so you think she ticked the Native American box on whatever form it was because she wanted to meet other Native law professors? I actually don't think that's necessarily wrong, but I certainly don't think it's the most likely explanation. But again, I don't really know and believe nobody ever will really know (maybe not even Warren at this point). Regardless, the people I know who think it's wrong think that with enough passion that the conversations I've overheard have left me feeling weird about Warren's claims of Native ancestry. Beyond that, I've tried to explain what I think is a generically ethical way to approach such claims, and I've suggested that it seems like Warren hasn't lived up to what I've posited are best practices. But I've tried to be pretty careful about not accusing her of anything in particular. And where I've insinuated (your word) anything about her actions, I've tried to be extra clear that I hare have no real idea what happened. To the best of my knowledge, that's what I've said in this thread. If you think otherwise, let me know.
I honestly think you're just wrong in 353. There's just no evidence, and not really a plausible story, that her checking a native american box had anything to do at all with her hiring at Harvard or Penn or that she was viewed as actually being a minority, native american, or anything else, by the Harvard or Penn faculty. Everyone who was there at the time is on the record as saying just the opposite and the documentary record also suggests the opposite, and (at least at Harvard) there was an extremely live at the time issue about hiring minority faculty, so this just didn't come up. I mean, you just don't have any evidence on the personal advantage point at all, yet you keep asserting it as if it must be truth.
I do think that Warren did (and probably does) identify as a white person in Oklahoma with some native ancestry. It's clear that this is how her family sees herself. The geneology seems inconclusive but suggests at least some Indian ancestry on one side of the family, which is consistent with a white person believing that they have native ancestors. So what?
Just checked as I suddenly recalled that census had white as an ancestry/origins category. It does this for other categories too. Except for NA. I'm not throwing this in here as a dictionary argument, just to illuminate. Here's the text:
American Indian and Alaska Native. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America) and who maintain tribal affiliation or community attachment.
353: I was talking specifically about it being within the context of the Harvard debate: that is, that it seems plausible to me that those two brief mentions in the Crimson could have happened without people going up to her and asking "wait is this true?". Her claim that she didn't know Harvard was doing that seemed plausible to me on grounds that someone not paying attention to that debate (which seems very in character, at least given what the link I posted says) might have never known that the administration was using her as a shield.
Also the first sentence of 353.3 is kind of wonderful, and true.
I do think that Warren did (and probably does) identify as a white person in Oklahoma with some native ancestry. It's clear that this is how her family sees herself. The geneology seems inconclusive but suggests at least some Indian ancestry on one side of the family, which is consistent with a white person believing that they have native ancestors. So what?
Leaving aside your mischaracterization of my claims, I'll just focus on the fact that, despite what you say above, she checked a box that said "Native American". As with MHPH, we passed "agree to disagree" territory about twenty comments ago.
I meant the Brown campaign in 353.2.
Also the first sentence of 353.3 is kind of wonderful, and true.
Cool. No comity, then. I'm fine with it if you are.
Oh wait, I just realized something about 358. You keep insisting there no evidence of some actual material gain. And I keep saying that from my perspective, she likely believed that claiming she was Native American may/could have benefitted her materially (though I don't have any evidence for that, it's true, other than the fact that it makes sense in context). And in my view, that's why her claim isn't okay. This is what I was trying to say in 277: that your burden is more burdensome than mine. But again, that's totally fine.
I've got to admit, I can't really make sense of 363.
364 -- Dude, the evidence is that she checked a box in the AALS faculty directory submission form, which is a form directory that lists law professors (and isn't really read, even by them). Her explanation for doing so is that she thought she might be put on lists or meet some other native american professors. If there was some other evidence that she'd ever tried to self-identify as native or gain advantage from doing so, you might have a point. But there isn't. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that she ever received any professional advantage at all from a claim for native status. None. There's been a lot of looking into this -- like, people who were there at the time have been interviewed and are on record, and saying that her native status had nothing to do with any hiring or promotion decision and wasn't even known to them. There is documentary evidence -- some of it linked above -- making the same point. Both at Harvard and at Penn law schools at the time there were substantial, ongoing debates about hiring minority faculty, yet there is no evidence that she ever identified as minority faculty for any relevant purpose at either school, and people who were there say the opposite. If she wanted to benefit from asserting native status she could have, but she didn't. Thus, despite your suspicions, there is no evidence that she has actually gained materially, at all, from the assertion. Nor is there any evidence that she sought to use a claim to native status for any gain.
In her memoir, she claims to be a white person with native ancestry on one side of her family, to the extent that it affected that side of the family. That seems to be both consistent with family lore and likely, to some unverifiable extent, true (either that she was 1/32 cherokee or that her family was otherwise derived from natives in Indian country passing as white).
I agreed about a zillion comments above that her checking the box probably wasn't the most thoughtful thing to do, but since there's no other evidence at all of either (a) her identifying as native american for professional gain or (b) others identifying her as native american and therefore providing her with a benefit, if that was a sin that was a very minor one.
Meanwhile, she has never (a) claimed membership in a tribe; (b) claimed to be native to get a job (c) claimed to be culturally native around other native americans. So we're left at the end of the day with a somewhat questionable decision to check a box on an AALS directory form that didn't particularly matter, by a person who identifies as having some Indian ancestry (a claim that, incidentally, seems to be true), but doesn't actually claim to be a native american for any benefit-conferring purpose. I'm not sure why that justifies raking her over the coals.
That whole exchange lost me, largely because I wasn't sure if by 353.3 you meant:
Add to that, Warren is from Oklahoma, where these issues are hashed out all the time.
or
But there you.
depending on whether you were counting the quoted paragraph or not.
367: she called herself Native American because she wanted to meet other Native American law professors, but she didn't/doesn't identify as Native American? This makes very little sense to me, but I might be missing something. Put another way, if she wanted to meet Native American law professors, she could have accomplished that in about seventy different ways, none of which involved identifying herself as Native American, an identity she didn't really claim.
That said, if saying that I have some pretty mild misgivings about her actions, and then defending myself from the charge that I'm parroting right-wing talking point, is "raking her over the coals," then so be it, I guess. Again, this is why I think we're not going to agree about this: because you keep on ascribing to me some deep-seated animus toward Warren, when actually I agree that whatever she did wasn't that big a deal, but also think that her behavior wasn't in keeping with what I've described as my conception of best practices. But even having said that, I keep trying to convey how mild my interest is, how little I know about the facts, and how very narrow my claims are. I get that you're not buying it. Fine.
366: I took you to be agreeing with me that we were coming at this from completely different places, and therefore we should agree to disagree. My point was that we're not going to reach comity, so let's agree that we've reached not-comity.
368: I meant the second. I thought for a bit that VW meant the first, but then the post immediately before referred to the second unquoted paragraph as 353.2, and now I'm lost.
she called herself Native American because she wanted to meet other Native American law professors, but she didn't/doesn't identify as Native American? This makes very little sense to me, but I might be missing something.
What if she dyed her hair black and made it straight(er)?
I'm also trying to write something for my day job at the moment, so I'm not spending as much time editing my comments as I should. I'm sure that I'm probably not making sense a bunch of the time, and that's gotta be leading to misunderstandings, so I'm sorry about that.
That was to Halford. I think MHPH has been worked pretty hard in this thread to misunderstand me in such a way that what I'm saying accords with his preconceptions, but I definitely could be contributing to the problem in that case as well.
Like, for instance, by writing "worked" instead of "working."
I agree that whatever she did wasn't that big a deal, but also think that her behavior wasn't in keeping with what I've described as my conception of best practices.
I take it that what you actually mean is "never in any context claim to be native american unless you can be accepted on a tribal roll." Which is fine, as a view, I'm not even sure I disagree.
Where I do disagree is that she was using a claim of native status for material personal gain, a claim that while you've been slippery about it, you seem to want to pin on her (at least, that she intended to obtain personal gain). But there's not evidence of that. There's no evidence of her actually taking advantage of a claim of native status for any actual gain, despite many opportunities to do so. The fact that she let her claim on an AALS directory form reflect her perceived heritage would only be something truly, as opposed to completely trivally, blameworthy if she actually was trying to get something out of doing so. But, in reality, all the evidence is completely to the contrary -- she wasn't, and she didn't.
To take VW's side, when Warren checked a box on an AALS survey, she ought to have thought about why the AALS was asking that question. They're not asking because they're amateur genealogists who are curious about her ancestors. They're asking that question because they want their profession to be more diverse so that it will be appealing to students of a broader range of backgrounds and so that good ideas won't be missed due to a lack of scholars with the relevant background. From that point of view (regardless of the genealogical facts back 100 years) Warren is just flat out not Native American. She doesn't bring any important Native American points of view to her work, and she doesn't give an example which Native American students could be inspired by. For the purposes of the question she's just not Native American at all. So, if she thought about it, it was actively misleading to check that box.
Now I don't think that makes it a scandal. Probably most people do something that level of wrong at least once a month. Nonetheless it's wrong behavior that should be called out so that people don't do it in the future.
the people I know who think it's wrong think that with enough passion that the conversations I've overheard have left me feeling weird about Warren's claims of Native ancestry
I think this is an important point for understanding where VW is coming from on this, and why he sees it so differently from MHPH and Roberto the Culture-Appropriating Tiger. The people in Native American Studies circles who care about this issue care about it a lot, and for good reason: there's a very real phenomenon of people in their circles, both academics and others, spuriously (or at least questionably) claiming Native ancestry or affiliation and getting lots of advantages from their alleged heritage. Ward Churchill is the most famous example. Given that context, a lot of people are very concerned with policing the boundaries around claims of Native ancestry, and they view Warren's claims in that light and find them problematic even if she didn't personally benefit from them. The fact that she could have benefited from them, along the lines of 209, is important from this perspective because it gives her a motive for making false claims.
For people who are not as tied in to those circles, Warren's ancestry claims are meaningful primarily in the context of the Brown campaign's attempt to use them against her, which obviously failed but inserted them into the political discourse in a way that ensured they would persist and be remembered as a vague "controversy" by people who hadn't been paying very close attention. From this perspective, bringing up the issue and questioning Warren's claims is generally a move made by right-wingers to try to discredit her by suggesting that she made them falsely to further her career. The fact that there's no evidence that the claims did in fact further her career effectively neutralizes this attack in practice, so of course her defenders are inclined to discuss it when someone brings up the issue. When it turns out that the other person isn't a right-winger trying to discredit Warren for political reasons but someone concerned about policing the boundaries of Native American identity, that defense doesn't work, and you get the sort of talking past each other that we've seen in this thread.
Having written all that out I'm not sure how much it adds to this discussion, but hopefully it clarifies it a little.
Having just taken VW's side, I think his intuition about "material benefit" is somewhat skewed from being in the humanities (but then mine is skewed being in the sciences, and I have no idea where Law falls in this). There's a difference between having a critical mass of people who genuinely buy into the importance of diversity, versus having people who mostly just care because it'll help them convince the dean to get an extra hire or get some extra money from the higher administration. (Not that there aren't plenty of scientists who care about diversity, but you're lucky if they aren't equally counterbalanced by racists/sexists.) My intuition is that if she'd materially benefited from it there'd likely be some clear documentation in the hiring process. But again, I'm not sure that my intuition is any better than VW's because Law is pretty far from either of our fields.
Roberto the Culture-Appropriating Tiger
The only possible reason for him not switching to that pseud (exclusively) is antisemitism.
I take it that what you actually mean is "never in any context claim to be native american unless you can be accepted on a tribal roll.
Yes, because this is exactly what I've said at least three different times in this thread. You're either trolling (pretty likely, right?), illiterate (totally unlikely, but things change), or just being a dick (par for the course, I guess, but I love you anyway). Seriously, I don't know or care any more. As I said above, at least twice and maybe more often than that, my claims are very narrow. If you want to read something more into them, including more stridency, have at it.
you seem to want to pin on her (at least, that she intended to obtain personal gain)
Nope, that's not what I've said. You can actually look at my words, you know. I've said that she should have known that she might benefit from such claims, and therefore, if one adopts my schema for best practices -- which, as I've said, one really need not -- she should have been more careful.
377 seems so self-evidently obvious to me, including this part -- "Now I don't think that makes it a scandal." -- that I don't know what to say. But I guess it seems so self-evidently obvious to me for precisely the reasons teo brings up in 378.1, which I thought I'd made clear but probably didn't, because I'm not big on clarity.
hopefully it clarifies it a little
I found it not only clarifying but cathartic.
379: I agree with most of this. That said, two points: first, I'm spent almost my entire career as a social scientist (though I self-identify as a humanist -- oh, the irony!); and second, law schools are hugely invested in diversifying their faculties.
Probably worth noting that I was some flavor of mini provost just last year.
she should have known that she might benefit from such claims
Even here, still disagreeing. Benefit how? Why would she have thought that she would benefit from that box-checking for the AALS form when she was not making native/minority status an issue for hiring, job advancement, promotion of her articles, or anything else? What was the benefit that she reasonably thought she might have received?
I do think that UPETGI's 377 is a legitimate reason to criticize her, very mildly, for not paying close attention to the reasons why the law schools were collecting that information. That's a fair critique, but also a pretty minor one.
And I'm sure that Teo's 378 is right. But, you know, the fact that she really hasn't actually made any serious effort to pretend to be native for any professional purpose at all seems to speak in her favor on that count, even if you're intensely focused on protecting the boundaries of native identity.
but hopefully it clarifies it a little
More than a little.
Also: what CC and VW said in multiple comments above.
382: But I'm pretty sure what myself and other people are saying is that given the circumstances - when she did it, the context in which she did it, the results and reasonably expected ones involved, what she says about her intentions, and so on - the "might" involved here is a really, really aggressive one. Even if she was acting from cynical ruthless (and hence inappropriate) motives the benefit she'd be shooting for would be of very, very low likelihood. And as a result the story where she culpably failed to exercise caution in avoiding those inappropriate benefits is really shaky.
I mean, it's technically possible that if I went outside and jumped up and down on the sidewalk waving my hands I might distract a driver who would crash and his wallet would fly through the air into my hands. But it's really unlikely. And it would probably be a stretch to say that going out and doing some jumping jacks would be iiresponsible because of the possibility of (unintentionally) ending up with his wallet in my hands.
Also in response to 378.2 it's worth pointing out that what I said way up at the beginning of this was that "questions about whether she used this to gain unfair affirmative action benefits remain" is precisely the moderate republican line, and so people who, non-culpably, aren't investigating it in detail really shouldn't be repeating it. I don't see any places where VW has actually argued that Warren isn't a beneficial force in politics or she should be removed from office or anything.
To 379, generally, in law faculty hiring, I'd think that there would certainly be a real advantage to being a native american *who identified publicly as native american and whom you could feature to students as a minority and a native american.* There's no advantage at all, as far as I know, to hiring someone who surreptitiously and under the radar sort-of claimed to be native american but not in any public way, but whom the hiring committee believed to be sort-of native american by background. And the advantage would probably be at its lowest in bankruptcy law, which is a technical field (by law school standards). Certainly no one would rate her scholarship in any way differently because of a claim to native status.
In the actual event, Warren was both (a) so prominent that she was a no-brainer hire anyway and (b) not publicly identified as native american, even in the context of a school in an intense, public struggle about hiring a minority woman law professor. So there's no real case for the idea that native status helped her get hired at Harvard or otherwise helped her professionally.
My great uncle said we were descended from Spaniards who were shipwrecked off the coast of Ireland after the defeat of the Spanish Armada.
I had a great aunt who said the same thing. She wanted to counter the (completely unsubstantiated and, as it turns out, flat out wrong) story of Native ancestry (with a story that was at least as dubious!).
the "might" involved here is a really, really aggressive one
The idea that it was entirely unlikely that she might gain from being known as Native when she ticked that box is, as I've said above, so foreign to me that I don't know what to make of it. And the idea that she needed to keep telling people that she was Native, once that claim had potentially been established, is even more foreign to me.
But I've already said this, among other things (most recently summarized by teo), several times. And yet, you keep reiterating that I'm parroting the GOP's talking points. So, let me double back to where I started by telling you to fuck off. But even if you won't do me that favor, let me ask, one more time, if we can't agree to disagree without you continuing to insist, despite all of my claims to the contrary, that I'm acting in bad faith or somehow serving as Scott Brown's pawn.
I am asking this in good faith. Seriously, spell out what advantage you'd reasonably think she'd get by checking that box, with reference to the specific context of her career and what we know about it. I can see one advantage, which is that *if* people thought that she in fact was claiming to be native american for affirmative action purposes, *then* they might have hired her on that basis. But, we know that in fact she made clear that she was *not* native american for those purposes and did *not* ask to be hired on that basis. What other advantages are you talking about, given her particular context?
she made clear that she was *not* native american for those purposes
What does this mean? How do we know this? She explicitly said, on job applications, "I'm not Native. Despite the fact that I once claimed I was, often tell stories about my Native heritage, and come from Oklahoma, where there are lots of blond Cherokees, let me be clear that I'm not Native." Do we know that? If that's the case, I really and truly want to know.
393: If yours and Moby's relations wanted to be really old school about "Black Irish", they could point out that in some mythologies Ireland was populated from Hispania.
One important piece of context here, that I think the lawyers may have a better sense of than the academics, is the precise role of the AALS directory in the legal academy.
We know that people on the Harvard faculty, the only hiring committee, did not believe her to be anything other than white at the time she was hired and that she did not claim to be anything other than white in any public forum other than checking that box nor was she willing to be announced as a minority hire in any way. We know that she did not otherwise claim minority status at Penn. Unless you think the Harvard faculty was really jazzed about hiring someone who was surreptitiously native American, seriously, what advantage did she get from checking that box?
Off the top of my head, a donor might decide they want to endow a chair and preferred that it go to a Native American (or an underrepresented minority more generally) and Harvard might have decided to give that chair to Warren rather than someone else. (Which isn't to say that she wouldn't deserve such a chair, she's a fantastic scholar, but I'm sure there'd be other deserving candidates too.)
397: We do know (if you're willing to ignore the Crimson article, which in context I am) that at a moment when HLS was in public trouble for lack of any minority female professors, they didn't publicly claim her as remedying that lack. I think that means that either she didn't claim to be Native American in the sense that would make her a minority hire, or at least that HLS didn't regard her as such.
Good grief man, if "seriously don't do that you're repeating their lines" crosses a horrible line for you then sure feel free to ignore the fact that at this point you really are insisting on an insane conspiracy of Machiavellian devilry on her part which coincidentally happens to match up to what news organizations credulously or FoxNewsously reported after hearing about it from Scott Brown's campaign, or whatever it is you're arguing for at this point.
402 et al. -- if she actually *created an impression that she was native american for hiring purposes* then, yese, clearly that might have benefited her for hiring purposes, and would have been semi-fraudulent. If she was using the directory entry to do that, that would have been bad. She very clearly did *not* do that and that was *not* in fact how the directory was used. Given the above, what is the issue? Is there some other benefit that she reasonably thought she was obtaining by checking the box?
The 1890 census was burned to make it impossible to verify Warren's claims. You all have no idea how deep this goes.
That was supposed to be to 401.
398: Without checking Wikipedia, I'm going to assert that's why "Hibernia" and "Iberia" are so similar.
I don't even understand what 404.1 means. There's no such thing as declaring yourself native american for hiring purposes, there are just hiring committees, deans, and higher administrators who either think you're native american or don't (or are willing to round up to win an argument). Even in situations like where the provost office is paying a portion of someone's salary, that's not something that would be public knowledge or even known to the person. If you're telling people that you're native american, there's certainly a chance that someone will use that information to help you out.
(Now, in Warren's case I think it's extremely unlikely that this actually ever happened, because I think someone would have known and leaked it to hurt her political chances. Nonetheless it could have happened down the road had she not switched careers.)
there are just hiring committees, deans, and higher administrators who either think you're native american or don't
There is no evidence in this case that anyone ever thought that Warren was Native American for any purpose related to hiring, nor that checking the box would have led people to reasonable believe so, nor that she did in fact create that impression in anyone, nor that anyone believed that she was.
And this goes back to why VW's attempt to limit the issue doesn't really work. He says he's making a very narrow point, that she shouldn't have done something that she should have known might have benefited her. But the only way that anyone's identified it as possibly being able to benefit her would be by convincing a hiring committee that she was native american. And no hiring committee, and no one else, believed that she was native american for purposes of hiring, teaching, or anything else. That simply didn't happen in the real world and the actual context of this hire. Despite checking that box, she was not publicly identified as a native american professor. So, given that, what was the advantage she was supposedly obtaining by checking the box?
I mean, again, there were *literally public protests* in law schools at this time about hiring minority women professors. If anyone really thought that they were hiring a minority woman professor in Warren at this time, that would have been a really big deal. But, in fact, she wasn't out there identifying as a Native American nor was she on anyone's list anywhere for being a minority hire.
In my one experience on an admissions committee, which makes me an expert, what we were told was that we should evaluate the applicants without regard to diversity considerations and come up with a list of people to admit, including alternate/wait list candidates. Then, after making the list, we were supposed to determine who met diversity criteria. We only had the application material to go on, no one called and said "are you diverse?" If anyone on the admit list met the criteria, then special funding kicked in and we could admit the next person on the waitlist. There was never a moment when someone got special treatment or asked to be treated as diverse, but it was still possible to benefit from it.
*To be clear, this wasn't just race and gender. Bollinger had recently been decided and we were all required** to attend a meeting clarifying how diversity admissions worked. At the meeting, someone from the Philosophy department asked if a white Mormon libertarian would count if you didn't have many people fitting that description in your department. The answer was yes.
**One, maybe two senior professors blew off everything admissions related, despite being chosen for the committee. I got the impression the faculty - I was grad rep - who did show up and do the work thought the slackers should go fuck themselves.
My opinion here is that:
1) I think it's overwhelmingly likely that Warren did not in fact get any material benefit.
2) Nonetheless, she ought to have known that here actions could have lead to her benefiting without any further action on her part.
Furthermore, I don't think it would have been possible for Warren herself to have been sure she hadn't benefited prior to the media feeding frenzy surrounding this. The only reason I'm so confident of 1 is that the media frenzy happened and didn't turn up anything.
she ought to have known that here actions could have lead to her benefiting without any further action on her part.
How? Again, spell out how this works. Given that it was clear that by the early 1990s law faculties, who were intensely aware of who was or was not a prominent minority female professor, did not in fact believe that this particular extremely prominent law professor was a native american woman.
Or, put differently, the whole argument is that she was creating a potentially misleading impression that she was native american for hiring purposes, and she should have known this could have benefited her. But, in fact, in the real world, at the time, she was not creating that impression, and no one thought she was "native american" for any relevant hiring purpose.
330 There's no marriage application. Apparently, that county didn't have applications yet in the year the marriage took place, and the person who is the source for having seen it says she was mistaken.
There's nothing upon which to base a claim that OC Smith was Native.
People were a lot more interested in boundaries in the mid 19th century than they are today.
How? Again, spell out how this works.
Someone on the hiring committee looks her up in the AALS directory and sees that it identifies her as a minority. This influences their decision to hire her. I doubt this is what actually happened, but it's not that hard to imagine.
411: I think re: the first bit that it's worth pointing out again that, at least as far as Harvard and quite possibly Penn as well, there were no other applicants. Harvard was going headhunting - in fact, very persistently because they offered her the job the first time in '93 and she turned it down - she only accepted an offer in '95.
416 -- yes, except that in the relatively small world of super-prominent elite law professors, and the *much much smaller* world of female minority law professors, everyone knows and knew who did and did not in fact identify as a minority. It was and is a big deal for law schools. Warren, in that sense, did and does not.
(Also, in practice, what 417 says, she was a person at that point who could have literally gone to any law school in the country on demand)
In context, and given all of her other actions, the idea that with no other referent a law school hiring committee would have decided based on nothing more than glancing at the AALS directory that Elizabeth Warren was Native American and should therefore count as a diversity hire is preposterous, and that is something that she would have known at the time.
In New Zealand, for most iwi, I think that Warren would be very clearly part of the iwi if she could whakapapa back to a definite member of the iwi no matter how far back that ancestor was (although in practice of course it can't really be any further back than 1830-ish). So, for instance, all descendants of Tahu Potiki, no matter how distant, are Ngāi Tahu.
The test for the Māori electoral roll, for instance, is "are you a New Zealand Māori or descendant of a New Zealand Māori" - a Warren-analog in NZ would be legitimately able to enrol on the Māori roll if she, in good faith and on reasonable foundation, thought she had Māori ancestry. And there are people who are definitely Māori but can't trace their ancestry back to a specific iwi for whatever reason.
Although there are usually iwi records that will be used to check if you are eligible to be a member of that iwi, but I think that varies from iwi to iwi.
Obviously in Australia there's a lot of people who are aboriginal but have lost touch with their people and land because of the genocidal government they had there.
This obviously doesn't have anything to do with Warren's case, but it might be interesting.
It's to her credit that she apparently never tried to use her Native status for gain. She couldn't have known what was going to happen in the future when she checked the box, and her explanation for her reasoning for checking it sounds pretty clueless to me. The 1980s was late enough that she had to know what the point of the question was, and that it wasn't so she could meet cool people. But she's right about a bunch of things -- things that are actually important -- and I'll be happy to vote for her.
418 was maybe badly written. What I am saying is that everyone in the world of elite law professors knew who Elizabeth Warren was by at least the mid-1980s. Everyone also knew who potential elite law professor female minorities were. This was not a big group of people. No one thought that Elizabeth Warren fell into the category of elite female minority law professor.
For her to have thought that by checking a box on an AALS questionnaire she would have reasonably led hiring committees to think she was Native American or a suitable candidate for a minority hire is wrong for a bunch of reasons. First, people already knew her. Second, she would have had to do something more than check the box to create that impression. This was not like some unknown just out of law school candidate applying for a position. As I said above, I think that if *at the beginning of her career* she'd identified on a form as Native American somewhere that might have played a role in her hiring.
By the mid-1980s the notion that how she filled out the AALS form would either have wrongfully led law school hiring committees to believe that she was a suitable diversity hire as a Native American, or that she would have been hired on that basis, is just, in context, wrong.
In my limited experience of a few hiring cycles headhunting is more likely to be a situation where minority status will play a role. If you've already been given a position, then you don't need to make an argument for why you should be given a position for this particular candidate. It's not a weird scenario that a group wouldn't be given a position and might try to get around that by identifying a strong minority candidate and using diversity as an argument to get a line for that specific candidate.
I think some of this may also be people just not understanding what a big deal she was in the world of Bankruptcy Law teaching until she went into politics. The most prominent bankruptcy professor out there, or at least in the top 3, since at least the mid-1980s until she ran for office. She wasn't like Obama, somebody who was basically a politician who kind of taught on the side. She was a very very serious academic absolutely at the top of her field when she was hired by Harvard, and, for that matter, Penn.
It wasn't just that she would have been hired regardless of any minority preference. It's that if in 1994 Elizabeth Warren had been seen as a Native American *every law school would have known that* and it would have been an even more important reason to hire her.
There should be late night food trucks with tacos and stuff that would drive around residential neighborhoods for the convenience of people staying up late who wanted something to eat right away.
418, 421: Well, yes, and I think given that context it's clear that Warren personally hasn't particularly benefited from claiming to have Native ancestry. For the people who care a lot about the general issue, though, there's value in calling out Warren for claiming that ancestry with little to no evidence backing it up in order to discourage others from making similar claims that may well benefit them substantially, especially if they aren't obvious superstars like Warren. And this really is a thing that people do, sometimes with great success (again, see Ward Churchill, at least until he attracted national media attention).
"in the world of Bankruptcy Law teaching" not going to lie, bit of a niche interest there.
Kind of a drag for Ramadan being so close to the solstice this year, huh? I'd better stock up on sambusas this week, it'll be impossible to buy them after that.
426 -- she was like the Grothendieck of Bankruptcy Law*
*law is not a real academic subject, but she was at the top of the game.
424:So bicycle deliveries don't count? What kind of Natilo Paennim are you anyway?
Can't you find an infidel who makes sambusas? Just look for somebody Lebanese (Maronite) or a white woman who says she's feels Lebanese.
I was going to say that people who object on cultural appropriation grounds probably don't care that much if she benefited, but I'll just endorse what teo's been saying.
I know, I know, I'm kind of a bad anarchist. Taco Cat is pretty decent, but a tiny bit on the expensive side for what you get, it seems to me. I should be more supportive though, it is the kind of project I support.
I did order Spokes Pizza (bicycle-delivered pizza from 10 years or so ago) more often.
To completely change the subject, but not the topic: Clarence King
430: Well, I'm sure there's Somali-owned sit down restaurants that will be serving during daylight -- remember that we got the more cosmopolitan tranche of refugees, so there's plenty of non-believing Somalis in town, let me assure you. But the coffee shops and convenience stores likely won't have them.
The devote really like to work in convenience stores?
433: I don't get it. Why go through all that trouble and not get a second wife?
"in the world of Bankruptcy Law teaching" not going to lie, bit of a niche interest there.
Strong words for a man who uses "whakapapa" as a verb.
||
Noser finally finished his workbook and so earned Minecraft. It is really fun. I let him play more than I expected, since I got.to help so much.
|>
Why go through all that trouble and not get a second wife?
It's like you don't even understand the meaning of trouble.
Richard Seymour, one of my intersectional Marxists, is pretty good on Dolezal. Starts:
There is no point in me joining in the endless attacks on Rachel Dolezal. I'm tempted to say that I have no moral basis for criticising her when, like millions of people worldwide, I have been fronting as a white man all these years. The accent, the hairstyle, the appalling diet, the sumptuary choices, the music, the terrible, terrible clothing. I've bought into every racial stereotype of back-woods Northern Irish redneck scum you could possibly invent. You wouldn't believe the lengths that some people will go to in order to uphold some specious 'identity'.
Me too, been passing as a "white man" for decades! Funny joke, but I spose the usuals will say he is missing something about privilege. Ends:
I don't think we should have any loyalty to this state of affairs. We should, if anything, be in staunch opposition to it. We shouldn't invest in the categories of white and black as anything more than social locations, and as ones which we intend to abolish. But it is a state of affairs that is not superseded by an individual's will or say-so.
Ummm...reading Braidotti to try to determine the politics of differences between the identities we are assigned and the ones we choose, especially since we are nowhere near as free as we think we are, or told we are.
438: it's a lot of fun. I'm glad parents can use it for bonding.
There's a post (which I can't find right now) from the early days of the blog where I linked to an Elizabeth Warren lecture, just because it was so good, not because I had any idea who she was.
441's "I don't think we should have any loyalty to this state of affairs" is a nice construction, with all sorts of applications.
Dead thread, but a more commonplace brand of deception by Dolezal (maybe it is referenced somewhere upthread? Not sure):
That's harder to be sympathetic towards.
Overall, I found Jamelle Bouie's take on it to be the best.
It's about ethnics in video game journalism plagiarism.
The Last Psychiatrist's take on pathological liars seems relevant here:
"The pathological liar doesn't place much value in experience; it's all in identification. He doesn't need to be in the military to know exactly what it's like, because he's watched enough war movies (e.g. one) or read Tom Clancy. (Aside: that's the huge appeal of Clancy and Crichton-- enough detail to make you think you know the inner workings of the professions they describe.) It's wrong to dismiss the lies as valueless; like Zelig, these people do have an intuitive grasp of the relevant thought process, emotions, affects, and even consequences of the experiences they describe. They're just made up. So when he gets caught in his lie, he secretly blames the other person for not appreciating that whether it's a lie or not is trivial, irrelevant; it still affected him just the same."
The idea of valuing identification over experience seems to explain certain behaviors of quite a few people, not just those with diagnosed psychiatric problems.
The idea of valuing identification over experience seems to explain certain behaviors of quite a few people, not just those with diagnosed psychiatric problems.
We've had quite enough Millennial-bashing 'round here, but keep going.
If you're going to steal, steal from the best. I like her sun and sky better, but his waves are killer.
Seconding 446.
449: Excuse me, we identify as snake people.
"Rachel Dolezal's painting The Shape of Our Kind is a near duplicate of J.M.W. Turner's 1840 The Slave Ship."
As a British person I am enraged at this American appropriating our unique culture and heritage. She'll be writing Harry Potter fanfic next, you just watch.
Of course she's writing Harry Potter fanfic. Every white woman her age is.
445, 450: Her painting is more clearcut: you can see immediately everything that is going on in it. He's got all that weirdness and those hands in the water. It makes the painting scarier.
454: Sure, and that's very characteristic of Turner. So much of his work exists in this weird twilight world, full of uncertainty. I do absolutely love his style, but sometimes wish things would be a bit clearer.
It's perfectly clear. I can even read the time on the one guy's watch.
456: And the time is "Too Late!"
Anyone who knows anything about art would have grasped immediately that this was an ironic appropriation of the Turner image.
Sure, and that's very characteristic of Turner. So much of his work exists in this weird twilight world, full of uncertainty.
I think Dolezal's work does, too, now.
John Martin, surely?
(Don't let me down, people.)
I'm looking forward to seeing her Judgment of Paris.
448: because he's watched enough war movies
Even he wasn't a big enough asshole to deserve Alzheimer's.
462: I don't think that's Dolezal's excuse, however.
463 - I dunno, I think the passage of time softens things to the point where it's hard to remember exactly how much of a vicious, nasty, awful man he really was, and how much harm he did to how many people. I mean, George W Bush was president like seven years ago and already sometimes I forget just how much damage he did to the world, and to America's reputation, and how the next person elected president was immediately awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for not being George W Bush. Reagan certainly deserved some genuinely horrifically awful things, and I don't know if Alzheimer's went over that mark but it can't have gone very far over it.
465: Right. One of the things that really stands out for me was giving the State's Rights Speech at the Neshoba County Fair (Philadelphia is the county seat) during the 1980 campaign. Of course it was some Atwateresque aide rather than Reagan who decided to do that, but he was clearly all in on that aspect of the national Republican renaissance.
I honestly don't remember working on Moore v. Howard University, but I kind of think I probably did do something or other. Maybe just helped out a bit.
I just read about her suit against Howard University about an hour ago. It really is kind of icing on the surreal cake.
I read that Reagan book thats been about a while - The Invisible Bridge (sequel to Nixonland). Regan's relationship with the truth was really kind of staggering. Like, yeah, I knew the guy told some lies, but the way he built his entire political career around just making shit up was amazing.
What I don't understand is how it seems like nobody ever successfully called him on it.
469.2 -- There was a constant drumbeat. His supporters didn't care.
I remember the Doonesbury stuff in particular.
Cheney was right but underinclusive when he said that Reagan had proven that deficits don't matter. He proved that reality doesn't matter.
Blast from the past: Msla has a condemnation proceeding to take the water company from the Carlyle Group. The district judge just issued the order allowing condemnation -- setting the price will be a later phase of the case -- and I see that Carlyle called as once of its principal experts Arthur Laffer. Yeah, that Arthur Laffer.
Judge Townsend was not impressed by his testimony.
Hey look, there's a Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity. I'm probably a 4, give or take. Is everyone just pissed off at this Dolezal woman for being a 6?
Eh, they played an interview with Dolezal on the radio last night as I was driving, and in her patient stubborn determination to assert what she wanted to believe in the face of all known facts I had a horrible flashback to Caroline of Brunswick -- that sense that there would always be an excuse, an evasion, a reconfiguration of the story such that no possible evidence would prove she'd ever been wrong about anything. It makes me want to shake myself like a dog.
The interviews are great! Reminds me of the "these aren't my pants" type exchanges with drug addicts.
"I haven't had a DNA test. There's been no biological proof that Larry and Ruthanne are my biological parents," Dolezal said in an appearance on "NBC Nightly News." "There's a birth certificate that has your name on it and their names on it," interviewer Savannah Guthrie responded. "I'm not necessarily saying that I can prove they're not," Dolezal said. "But I don't know that I can actually prove they are. I mean, the birth certificate is issued a month and a half after I'm born. And certainly there were no medical witnesses to my birth."
Her parents were into deep-hippie enough for an unassisted birth?
Wasn't there a teepee involved?
The pee-pee teepees were pointless. Even if you did remember to put it on while changing the diaper, the urine stream would just blast it out of the way. Besides, those were just for boys.
At this point I'm waiting for the revelation that she was the real master mind behind 9/11. It seems like it's only a matter of time.
"But I don't know that I can actually prove they are. I mean, the birth certificate is issued a month and a half after I'm born. And certainly there were no medical witnesses to my birth."
Jerome Corsi, call your office! Why won't they release the long-form birth certificate if there's nothing to hide?
And certainly there were no medical witnesses to my birth.
So we can't rule out that she was not of woman born.
Well, if she was born on a distant planet which has subsequently blown up, and was found by her "parents" in a crashed spaceship in a cornfield, then I reckon she can adopt whatever ethnicity she damn well pleases. Are you going to challenge her?
Cornfield vs. cotton field vs. rice paddy.
Plus his appearance worked perfectly for someone named Clark Kent, and he'd have picked up all his cultural ques from that identity.
Has somebody written about the "orphan trains" which took orphans, often immigrants out of the cities onto the prairies and plains, where Ma and Pa Kent could take them home as their own, and which social experience may lie behind the story of Superman?
Legally speaking, she would still be a US citizen, as a foundling (under 8 USC 1401), but I am not sure what if anything her legal ethnicity would be. As far as I know, there is no objective legal definition of "race" in US law; it's up to you what you identify as. But IANAL.
If I choose to identify as a Kryptonian, who are you to challenge my lived experience?
But she couldn't run for president.
Depends when she landed. If she landed in 1768 or before she would have been a US citizen at the time of the signing of the Constitution and therefore be eligible to run for president. (Foundlings become citizens at 21).
I don't think it's ever been adjudicated with that specific fact pattern, but I'm pretty sure you need to be born here or born of a parent who is a citizen. If you only had to be a citizen at the time of the signing of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton would have been eligible.
The internet says I'm wrong on that, but googling is hard because of various Obama nuts.
Constitution says: "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President."
Right. The second part of that slipped my mind because of the whole thing about human life spans.
She really is channeling Dietz. No wonder an IME was ordered in her Howard case.
She's from Troy, and I keep trying to think of a worthy* joke to make out of that, but just can't get it together. Moby?
* Judgment of Paris is not worthy.
... ἦλθε δ' Ἀμαζών,
Ἄρηος θυγάτηρ μεγαλήτορος ἀνδροφόνοιο.
(An Amazon came, a daughter of Ares the mankiller.)
To this well-painted piece is Lucrece come,
To find a face where all distress is stell'd.
Many she sees where cares have carved some,
But none where all distress and dolour dwell'd,
Till she despairing Hecuba beheld,
Staring on Priam's wounds with her old eyes,
Which bleeding under Pyrrhus' proud foot lies.
In her the painter had anatomized
Time's ruin, beauty's wreck, and grim care's reign:
Her cheeks with chaps and wrinkles were disguised;
Of what she was no semblance did remain:
Her blue blood changed to black in every vein,
Wanting the spring that those shrunk pipes had fed,
Show'd life imprison'd in a body dead.
tl;dr: 495 gets it exactly right.