Elizabeth Warren, Oppressed Minority

Wags are having fun at the expense of Scott Brown challenger Elizabeth Warren, the undocumented Indian. Seems this patrician whitebread Ivy Leaguer listed herself as a minority faculty member based upon a Cherokee great-great-great grandparent. So although technically correct, it is unseemly…

You’ve played the Indian card. You’ve grabbed for minority cred without enduring the minority grief. It’s poached diversity. It’s glommed onto, what, five generations removed... (Margery Eagen)

My great-great grandma was full-blooded Choctaw, complete with her own medicine bag, poultices, homemade clothes and mysterious folkways learned from her elders.  That makes me more of an Indian than professor Pocahontas Warren, but you don't see me billing myself as an Indian blogger.

"7.62 in the corner pocket!"

This is also why I don’t tout myself as an Iraq or Afghanistan veteran. Yeah, I’ve been there, so calling myself such would technically be true, but it plants a certain idea in people’s minds that is just not accurate, and it takes away from not just the true heroes, but also the prosaic grunts who spent ten times as much time there as me and who did much harder and much more dangerous duty than I. As Margery Eagen would say, it would be poached glory.

Divide and Conquer

This is the sliminess that comes from sorting people into special groups and categories and assigning special status based upon tribal affiliations, real or invented.

And it’s not just corrupt and slimy, it is damned maddening. I have Indian friends, and none of them are Boston law professors. They’ve faced discrimination, and I’ve been to the reservations they grew up on. If any of you have seen some reservations in New Mexico, you’d be sickened at this shameless woman’s brazen abuse of “minority cred.”

And the condescending way the PC crowd constantly uses the term Native American is laughable.

Go ask an Indian what he calls himself, he’ll usually say American, and if pressed, he’ll label himself an Indian or the tribe he came from. Drive through reservations in the southwest and look at their school mascots. While indignant agitation groups of white enforcers attack politically incorrect sports team mascots, reservations school sports teams are overwhelmingly Redskins, Tomahawks, Indians, Warriors, Chiefs, Apaches, etc..

Here are some past blog post of mine that are unrelated to Warren but slightly relevant:
Arizona, Take off Your Indian Braids
There’s a Little Eichmann in all of Us