For those Americans who weren’t inclined to spend the Labor Day weekend reading the Boston Globe’s 5,500-word exploration of Elizabeth Warren’s employment history, let us catch you up: After an exhaustive review of documents and interviews with scores of the Massachusetts senator’s past colleagues at Penn and Harvard law schools, the Globe concludes that “her claim to Native American ethnicity was never considered by the Harvard Law faculty, which voted resoundingly to hire her, or by those who hired her to four prior positions at other law schools.” The former law professor may have claimed on an employment form that she was a Native American, and her employer may have categorized her as a racial minority for reporting purposes, but this claim had no bearing on her advancement as a professor of bankruptcy law.
Accusations that Warren claimed Native American ancestry to gain some affirmative-action advantage at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard law schools have circulated for years. The fact that she made such a claim is beyond dispute: In 1989, three years after she took the job at Penn, she had the school change her listed ethnicity from “White” to “Native American.” Similarly, in three separate internal reports on Penn’s affirmative action efforts, the university listed one Native American professor—namely Elizabeth Warren.
Now she has chosen to set the record straight by unsealing a wealth of academic and employment records, and the Globe’s team of crack reporters have spent months getting to the bottom of one of the great questions of our age—whether Elizabeth Warren got a job by calling herself a Cherokee. The answer, at last: No!
Why now? She’s been dogged by these accusations for years—President Donald Trump routinely calls her “Pocahontas,” and many of her critics, including this magazine, have gently ridiculed her for her evasive answers on the question. “This is the kind of public servant I want to be—transparent,” she explains to the Globe. “I just, I’m ready for it all to be out there.”
In other words: She’s running for president in 2020 and wants to get this behind her.
For our part, we have no trouble believing that Warren’s claim, risible as it was, played no part in helping her career advancement. She got the jobs at Penn and Harvard because she was a very bright woman with superb teaching skills. “In sum,” the newspaper peremptorily announces, “it is clear that Warren was viewed as a white woman by the hiring committees at every institution that employed her.”
But that use of the passive voice—she “was viewed” as white, not Native American—nicely sidesteps the more important question: Why did she make the claim at all? Warren’s grandmother, who died in 1969, spoke of her connection to the Cherokee and Delaware tribes, and her mother and three aunts died in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The law professor’s self-designation as Native American, she explains, was her way of preserving familial and cultural ties to her mother’s side of the family and her Oklahoma roots.
Well, maybe. But Warren was smart enough to know that she was in no meaningful sense “Native American.” It’s one thing to value one’s connection to a distinctive culture; it’s another thing entirely to request an employer to change one’s status of ethnicity. The fact that Warren’s employers were liberal northeastern universities—institutions that afford a variety of benefits to people deemed racial minorities—makes her maneuver suspect if not obviously dishonest.
The Globe may have established beyond doubt that Warren won her academic advancements fair and square, but the newspaper’s lengthy report hasn’t change the politics of the question at all. Simply put, there is no world in which Elizabeth Warren’s claim to be Native American is anything other than hilarious.
