Native American Voters Exploited by Brown and Warren

The campaign has successfully latched on to Warren’s claim of Native American roots as a rallying tool to deflect attention away from pressing issues facing Massachusetts residents, but also to attack, in a more insidious way, the hotly contested issue of affirmative action.

Nonetheless, in a Boston.com article dated April 30, 2012, Noah Bierman reported that the New England Historic and Genealogy Society had confirmed Warren’s claim. So why does Warren appear to be backing off her statement of her heritage by continuing to refer it as something she had only heard of as family lore?

How and when Warren used her purported Native American status raises questions, especially since Warren attests she didn’t use it to advance her career. But according to the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) desk book, a directory of law professors, Warren listed herself as a minority for nearly a decade from 1986 through 1995 – the same year she left the Republican party to join the Democratic party, and also the same year she was hired at Harvard.

“I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am. Nothing like that ever happened, that was clearly not the use for it and so I stopped checking it off,” Warren told reporters in Braintree, Massachusetts.

If Warren’s sole objective in listing herself as a minority in the AALS was to network with people like herself, skeptics query why Warren never attended Native American functions at Harvard and other academic institutions at which she was employed, or made attempts to reach out to Native American faculty across the country.

In 1998, the year that Harvard Law School finally tenured its first African American female, Lani Guiner, the Harvard Crimson wrote that ”Although the conventional wisdom among students and faculty is that the Law School faculty includes no minority women…Elizabeth Warren is Native American.”

Warren has been asked by several Native American groups, like the Native American delegates to the Democratic National Convention, which includes the great-grandson of the legendary Native American warrior, Geronimo, to explain her ancestry claims, but she refused.

Warren’s now silence on the controversy makes you ponder that her disclosing her Native American ancestry didn’t render the intended outcome. I believe it is an insidious function of white privilege to meander in and out of racial groups to suit a purpose, without making a commitment to the group to which one initially sought inclusion.

Her avoidance in not addressing the controversy head-on feeds into Brown’s race-baiting diversion tactics. And, sadly, both are using their white skin privilege exploiting Native American voters, either by using racial slurs with impunity as Brown’s campaign staffers did this past weekend, and by the overt racism Brown himself has demonstrated, or by not fully explaining one’s apparent change of heart regarding identity, as Warren appears to have done.