Bloggers and Reporters uncover Warren's history of claiming to be Native American for employment purposes
Soon after the Boston Herald report, information was uncovered
[8] by George Mason University Law School Professor David Bernstein
[9] that starting in the mid-1980s, when she was at U. Penn. Law School, Warren had put herself on the “Minority Law Teacher” list in the faculty directory of the Association of American Law Schools but dropped from that list when she gain tenure at Harvard in 1995.
Warren had not previously revealed these law directory entries. The AALS directory was used as a recruiting tool
[10] by law schools in that time period in order to identify, among other things, minority law professors.
According to Professor David Bernstein
[11]:
“In the old days before the Internet, you’d pull out the AALS directory and look up people. There are schools that if they were looking for a minority faculty member, would go to that list and might say, ‘I didn’t know Elizabeth Warren was a minority,’ ” said George Mason University Law professor David Bernstein, a former chairman of the American Association of Law Schools.
Warren aides clammed up yesterday and refused to answer questions about why she stopped listing herself in the AALS directory after 1995. Around that time, Harvard Law School started boasting that Warren was their first minority female professor.
“That appendix strikes me as obviously allowing people to announce themselves as being members of minority groups in case people are looking for such members for whatever reason,” Bernstein said.
When confronted with this information, Warren admitted
[12] she had filled out forms listing herself as Native American, claiming she wanted to meet other Native Americans:
[13]
Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, fending off questions about whether she used her Native American heritage to advance her career, said today she enrolled herself as a minority in law school directories for nearly a decade because she hoped to meet other people with tribal roots.
“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,” said Warren….
“Being Native American has been part of my story I guess since the day I was born,” said Warren, who never mentioned her Native American heritage on the campaign trail even as she detailed much of her personal history to voters in speeches, statements and a video. “These are my family stories, I have lived in a family that has talked about Native American and talked about tribes since I was a little girl.”
[14]
That explanation did not make sense
[15] because the AALS faculty directory only listed Warren as “minority,” not as “Native American,” so putting herself on that list was not a way to meet other Native Americans. In fact, when Warren was a Harvard Law School faculty member, she was invited three times to speak to Harvard’s Native American student group and never accepted
[16].
Later, reporters uncovered that Warren had represented herself to both U. Penn
[17] and Harvard for federal reporting purposes
[18] as Native American. Warren herself never disclosed that she had represented herself to U. Penn and Harvard as Native American, that information was discovered by reporters.
The Boston Globe
[19] reported that Warren received recognition as a “minority” law professor while at U. Penn Law School:
“The University of Pennsylvania, where Warren taught at the law school from 1987 through 1995, listed her as a minority in a “Minority Equity Report” posted on its website. The report, published in 2005, well after her departure, included her as the winner of a faculty award in 1994. Her name was highlighted in bold, the designation used for minorities in the report.”
Investigative reporter Michael Patrick Leahy of Breitbart.com uncovered that in 1993, when Warren was a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, the Harvard Women’s Law Journal included Warren on a list of Women of Color in Legal Academia.
[20] It was the policy of the Law Journal to check with the persons on the list before they were listed.
Politico
[21] uncovered that in 1997 The Fordham Law Journal listed Warren as Harvard Law School’s first “woman of color” on the faculty:
“There are few women of color who hold important positions in the academy, Fortune 500 companies, or other prominent fields or industries,” the piece says. “This is not inconsequential. Diversifying these arenas, in part by adding qualified women of color to their ranks, remains important for many reasons. For one, there are scant women of color as role models. In my three years at Stanford Law School, there were no professors who were women of color. Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995.””
Despite the listing of Warren as minority in the AALS Faculty Directly, the knowledge at U. Penn. Law that she was Native American and/or minority, the listing of Warren as a Woman of Color in Legal Academia in 1993, and Warren’s own self-reporting to U.Penn and Havard Law Schools that she was Native American, Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried, a member of the hiring committee at the time, has asserted that he was not aware that Warren claimed to be Native American until after she was hired.
[22]
Havard Law School has not released
[23] the original hiring records to confirm Fried’s recollection.
[24] under Harvard and EEOC definitions of Native American, a definition which likely was on the page
[25] when she checked the box. That definition requires both actual Native American ancestry and cultural identification through tribal affiliation or comunity recognition.
Warren did not meet either part of the test, and even if she believed her alleged family lore, Warren should have known that she could not show cultural identification. Warren has refused to release
[26] her personnel records which would contain the forms she signed.
Warren admitted that she did not meet the legal qualifications to be considered a racial minority
[27]
Q. But you would not call yourself a racial minority?
A. The legal qualifications, no.
Harvard and U. Penn also refuse to release
[28] these employment records.
As reported by The Boston Globe,
[29] Warren’s self-identification as Native American may have caused U. Penn.
[30] and Harvard Law Schools to make false federal filings
[31] with regard to faculty diversity. Neither organization will release the records.
[32] showed that Warren had no Cherokee or other Native American ancestry. The findings are set forth at the blog Thoughts From Polly’s Grandaughter
[33] which based the research on over one hundred primary sources,
[34] and detailed the findings:
The team and I have done an exhaustive search on the genealogy of Elizabeth Warren. We have researched ALL of her ancestral lines, but have only posted those she claimed were Indian here in the blog. None of her direct line ancestors are ever shown to be anything other than white, dating back to long before the Trail of Tears.
The findings were detailed in the following posts, among others:
Warren herself represented that both her mother
[35] and her Aunt Bea
[36] were white on death certificates filed with the State of Oklahoma.
Initial claims by a genealogist in Boston that Warren was 1/32 Cherokee were withdrawn
[37] as lacking evidence.
[38] The Boston Globe had promoted the news that Warren was 1/32 Cherokee, but when the lack of evidence was discovered, The Boston Globe printed the correction in a section of the paper
[39] unlikely to be noticed by the public.
All known evidence shows that Warren’s family always self-identified as white, and her great grandfather even was identified in local newspapers as white when it was reported that he shot an Indian.
[40]
[41] her parents for documentation, and even made that argument part of her campaign.
[42]
Yet Warren did not identify as Native American as a child or when applying to college or law school. Instead Warren waited until her late 30’s, around the time she joined the U. Penn. Law School, and then used that identification only in connection with establishing herself for employment purposes as a minority.
Warren’s explanation has been criticized
[43](emphasis in original):
What does being a kid have to do with getting documentation? Ms. Warren’s parents didn’t die until the 1990s. She was an adult longer than she was a child during their lives. Are we to assume being Indian was such an important part of their lives
[44]it was never mentioned during her adulthood?
So she didn’t ask for documentation as a child because children don’t think to do those things. Ok, we will give her that, but
what is her excuse for not asking for documentation in 1986 when she was 37 years old BEFORE she started listing herself as a minority in the legal directories?
Her mother was still alive. Ms. Warren’s mother, Pauline Reed Herring, the purported Indian, died in 1995.
[45] At that time, Ms. Warren was 46 years old. She wasn’t a child any longer and she had already claimed to be a minority in legal directories for nine years, starting in 1986….
[46]
Elizabeth Warren listed herself as a minority
without proof for 9 years
while her mother was alive. Asking for documentation as a child had nothing to do with it.
