Posted on 10/07/2012 9:15:41 PM PDT by Kaslin
Twice Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren have faced off in televised debates, and twice the Massachusetts Senate candidates traded blows over Warren's claim to American Indian ancestry within seconds of the opening bell. The Republican incumbent and his Democratic challenger have launched dueling campaign ads calling even more attention to the issue, and there has even been a mini-kerfuffle over the low-rent antics of a few Brown staff members, who were filmed war-whooping and tomahawk-chopping at a campaign event in Dorchester.
Plainly the question of Warren's Cherokee heritage isn't going away any time soon. I'll be surprised if she and Brown don't sink their teeth into it again when they meet for Debate No. 3 in Springfield on Wednesday.
Maybe this time, for a change, they can focus on why it matters: not because race and color count, but because they never should.
One reason the issue doesn't matter is Warren's looks. "Professor Warren claimed that she was a Native American, a person of color," Brown said less than 30 seconds into his first answer at their Sept. 20 debate in Boston. "And as you can see," he added, pointing to his blond-haired, blue-eyed rival, "she's not." It was a cringe-inducing moment. Does the junior senator from Massachusetts really think he can "see" racial identity? Does he believe that American Indians -- or Asians, or African Americans -- can be infallibly distinguished by their physical characteristics?
Then again, Brown isn't the only candidate in the Massachusetts Senate race who seems to think physical appearance equals racial corroboration. Warren does too. When controversy erupted in the spring over the fact that she listed herself for nearly a decade in the Association of American Law Schools directory of "minority law teachers," she told reporters that her grandfather "had high cheekbones like all of the Indians do."
To be fair, Warren hasn't repeated that comment. And Brown now denies implying that his opponent can't be a Native American because she doesn't look like one -- "I never made that suggestion at all," he told reporters.
But neither campaign has let the issue die.
For months Republicans have had a field day with Warren's claim to be Cherokee on the strength of unverified "family lore" about her great-great-great grandmother. Brown's TV spot milks the "Fauxcahontas" angle with clips of news stories reporting on the story. "Warren admitted to identifying herself as Native American to employers," one broadcast journalist says. "Something genealogists said they have zero evidence of," intones another. Firing back in her own 30-second commercial, Warren accuses Brown of vilifying her parents. "Scott Brown can continue attacking my family," she says, speaking directly to the camera, "but I'm going to keep fighting for yours."
None of this would matter if it weren't for the fact that nearly half a century after the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, racial discrimination – in the form of affirmative action – is entrenched in American society. Warren insists that she "never got any benefit because of my heritage," and that the only reason she listed herself as an American Indian in professional law-school directories was to be invited to lunches "with people who are like I am." Her explanations provoked so much ridicule because they were ridiculous. Everyone knows that minority status can confer serious advantages when employers place a premium on "diversity," and use racial preferences and set-asides to achieve it.
Martin Luther King memorably dreamed of a nation in which people would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, and in much of American life his dream has become a reality.
But not within the contemporary diversity industry, where individual men and women are first and foremost members of categories, to be grouped by race, by ethnicity, by color. That's the logic behind a directory of "minority law teachers." It was also the mindset behind Jim Crow and "separate but equal."
The real significance of Warren's supposed Native American heritage isn't that she lacks proof that one of her 32 great-great-great grandparents was a Cherokee. It isn't that she believes the stories she was told as a girl. It isn't that by identifying herself as a racial minority she may, in Brown's words, have seized "an advantage that others were entitled to."
It is that in 21st-century America, no such advantage should exist. Racial preferences should by now be artifacts of history, not tools for hiring law professors. Two generations ago Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP declared that "classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society." Do the Massachusetts Senate candidates agree or disagree? Now there's a question worthy of debate.
What if half the country could produce some piece of paper “proving” they were a minority? What happens when the people who are now classified by race-mongers as minorities become the majorities? The whole thing is a sick joke perpetrated by the usual suspects, idiot liberals, who never seem to be able to see down the road the ridiculous situations and misery their stupid racial classifications have caused. Anything to get a vote. Hey, vote for me because my great-great-great-great-great-great third cousin twice removed was a minority. Big whooping deal.
I started becoming a Mexican American with the 2000 census. (My dad told me on his deathbed. Prove he didn’t) Im the only Mexican American in his late 30’s who is single, has no kids and makes 15X the minimum wage. Bet im screwin up the bell curve lol. I suggest we all become minorities.
“Does the junior senator from Massachusetts really think he can “see” racial identity?”
If it cannot be seen, then how could it possibly be something for which she should get an AA quota?? Isn’t the whole basis of discrimination that the racist can see the persons difference, and uses it against them? If hers even existed (the Cherokees reject her claim too), how has it EVER subjected her to a life of Jim Crow, sitting in the backs of buses, etc?
Naw, I’m Dutch-American on the last 3 census. If everyone else. An have a hyphenated name then I can too!
I’m 25% Italian.... I guess I can always claim to be a “LATINO!”
To the liberal mind is not important whether Elizabeth Warren herself individually suffered discrimination because of her alleged Native American heritage, it is important that a demographic group can be identified which at some time in history suffered discrimination. Therefore, the liberal mind cannot tolerate that which it perceives to be an injustice and feels compelled to reorganize society to cure the perceived problem.
In this way we arrive at the ultimate in identity politics. It does not matter whether the individual is actually discomfited by his race or ethnicity, it does not matter if the alleged societal wrong is even currently ongoing, it matters only that the statist can shape the world according to his concept of justice. In the course of doing justice, it does not matter if in the real world innocent people are unjustly disadvantaged by this reordering of society.
This is only a few steps away from the boxcars of the deportation trains in terms of the inner workings of the statist' s mind. Rather than make reference to the off-cited historical situation, the Holocaust on the Nazi side, let us consider the Soviets occupation of Poland in 1939 when they slaughtered classes of people. Those who might be a threat to socialism were exterminated and that was done not so much on racial lines but on lines of education, class, and avocation. Thus, priests were shot out of hand.
To the Soviet mind, the perfect society, that is socialism, was threatened by an identifiable group or class within society so they were exterminated. In this particularly virulent expression of identity politics, the perceived harm had not yet occurred, but might occur.
So when we say to the academic left in Massachusetts that granting Elizabeth Warren, because of fraud, a coveted teaching position at the most prestigious academic institution in the world is wrong because it deprives some legitimately qualified person of the job, it simply does not penetrate. They are willing to break eggs to make their omelette. They are willing to discriminate on the basis of race, class, color, or creed to advance their conception of a perfect world.
That their perfect world ostensibly is constructed out of a race, class, color, or creed blind model simply does not cause their computer screen to go blue. They will burn down the village to save it. It is human nature to rationalize away anomalies as trivialities or by way of distraction.
Thus the author of this article turns the criticism back on Senator Brown by accusing him of racism for assuming that Indians have common physical characteristics which Elizabeth Warren did not share when it is Senator Brown who is the one attacking those who practice racism-and those like Elizabeth Warren who unjustly profit from racism.
My daughter-in-law did a genealogy research on my mother’s side of the family and found a lot of interesting things. She found that I’m at least one percent Norwegian. That should get me some sort of minority classification.
(As in fraudulent DIShonesty on Warren's part...)
Answerable with another question: Who was it who bolstered her fraudulent claim to Native American ancestry -- by referring to her own "high cheekbones"?
LOL! I decided when they started the 'gender identity' thing that I'll claim to be whatever inconveniences the governmental official most at the time.
If, being a woman, I can stand in front of them and force them to accept me as a man, what prevents me from claiming to be other things I am not?
One of these days it will dawn on these romantic totalitarians that it isn't romantic, or ideal, or halcyon, or misty yearnings for everwhen, to behave like a murderous, slaughtering bore.
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