Just when I thought I had seen it all, I stumbled up this column by James Carroll in The Boston Globe, How family lore shapes character. The article takes the “you are who you think you are” defense of Warren to a whole new level.
It is other-worldy, as if no facts had come out showing that Elizabeth Warren has no Native American ancestry, that her family always identified as white, that prior to age 38 Warren always identified as white, that Warren listed herself as Native American in a law faculty directory used for recruiting which landed her on the list of “Minority Law Teachers,” and so on and so on.
Only someone willfully ignorant or disinterested in facts could make the arguments made by Carroll:
Here is the real significance of Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren’s much-discussed descent from Native Americans. In her case, she had no reason to distrust the facts she had been told, nor is there any evidence that she used them to advance her career. Those who slur Warren’s “character” miss how the trove of family story, myth, and memory shapes a person. What did this lore mean to Elizabeth Warren, and what did she make of the legacy she received?
It gets worse.
Carroll completely invents the claim that Warren’s family suffered discrimination because it was Indian. For God’s sake, Carroll, not even Warren claims that (emphasis mine):
The Cherokee people, in particular, paid the price of the “forced relocation” across thousands of miles, with thousands dead. More than in the rest of America, ghosts of the Indian wars abound in Oklahoma. Warren’s family, tracing itself to those Cherokees, was haunted by them. That the anti-Indian prejudice directed at her parents, like some bloodlines themselves, is impossible to document only underscores its viciousness. Bigotry thrives on innuendo.For us, the point is that Warren was marked early on by visceral identification with dispossessed victims.
You wonder how it is possible that a women who perpetrated an ethnic fraud for 25 years gets away with it in Massachusetts?
People like James Carroll are the reason.
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