Elizabeth Warren’s autobiography is out, and it looks like she is sticking precisely to her campaign script on her false claim to be Cherokee. The title is “A Fighting Chance.”
The Boston Globe, which has an advance copy (perhaps as a courtesy since it gave Warren so much help in the campaign), summarizes:
She spends several pages describing the family connections that have led her to assert a partial Native American heritage, for which she was criticized by Republicans in her 2012 Senate campaign….“As a kid, I had learned about my Native American background the same way every kid learns about who they are: from family,” she writes. “I never questioned my family’s stories or asked my parents for proof or documentation. What kid would?”Her ancestry became a major issue during the campaign, and Warren says she was stunned by the attacks – and that she couldn’t provide documentation because her family hadn’t registered any tribal affiliation.“In Oklahoma, that was pretty common,” she writes. “But knowing who you are is one thing, and proving who you are is another.”She reiterated that she did not use her background to gain special treatment. “I never asked for special treatment when I applied to college, to law school, or for jobs,” she writes.
This family dodge has been exposed so many times, detailed at Elizabeth Warren Wiki.
The short version is that she never lived as a Native American, but did use the claim to her advantage to get listed as a “Minority Law Teacher” in a directory used as a hiring device in the 1980s. Somehow the editors of The Harvard Women’s Law Journal knew about it when Warren was a visiting professor because they listed her as a Woman of Color in Legal Academia. Warren and Harvard never have released her hiring records.
Many of her family stories, including about her parents elopement and her Aunt Bee have been cast into doubt. Even her adult nephew termed the claim of Native American ancestry “rumor”.
If Warren had mistakenly lived her life openly as a Cherokee thinking she was Cherokee, that would be one thing and would be consistent with the supposed family lore. But she didn’t. She only was Cherokee when she was climbing the ladder to Harvard, and in a way that only prospective employers would understand.
The original title of the book was “Rigged.” She should have stuck with that.
UPDATE: Politico also got an advance copy, and Warren is blaming everyone else, including, ahem, “some blogger” for her Cherokee problem:
“What really threw me, though, were the constant attacks from the other side,” she writes about the 2012 Senate campaign. “I would almost persuade myself that I was starting to get the hang of full-throttle campaigning and then — bam! Out of left field, the state Republican Party, or the Brown campaign, or some blogger, would launch a rocket at me.”
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