from wiki:
The
racial classification of Indian Americans has varied over the years and across institutions.
[12] Originally, neither the courts nor the census bureau classified Indian Americans as a race because there were only negligible numbers of Indian immigrants in the United States. Various court judgements instead deemed Indians to be "White" or "not White" for the purposes of law. In 1970,
so yea, usually done for legal purposes.
And that actually touches on the Warren history as well as scores of other people, as it hearkens back to times of ignorance and bigotry, in that people of other (nonwhite) races, who could get away with doing so, would report themselves as "white" on census and similar forms, to (ironic pun intended) save their own skin. A century or two later message board wags waddle in and go "look, this ancestor was reported as 'white'". Yeah, no shit. The operative verb is
reported as. There's a distinct reason it was reported that way. Countless tales of social objections to who one marries or where one lives based on race or ethnicity abound from those times.
I've already mentioned how I had to ferret out my own Irish heritage after it was buried in my grandparents' time by that same dynamic. It's a smaller scale but it's the same mentality shift.
The glaring error in reasoning here is that social attitudes ******* CHANGE over time, and sometimes radically. In Warren's ancestors' time you just didn't "admit" to being Indian if you could get away with it. Many light-skinned African-derived people did the same thing. To wallow around unaware that that world existed, and not that long ago, is to be blindly ignorant to one's own society's
history.