During the 2012 Senate race between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren I appeared several times on the Nightside with Dan Rea radio show on WBZ Radio in Boston, a super station that covers all of New England and into upstate NY.
What I always enjoyed about being on Dan’s show is that he gave me a lot of time, usually a half- or full-hour segment. While an hour in radio time really isn’t anywhere near an hour because of commercials and news breaks, it’s still a luxury compared to so many of the 6-minute slots I often encounter. So with Dan, you get into a lot of substance, and it’s not a matter of speed-talking. I also got to respond to listener phone-in questions, which I really enjoy.
My 2012 topics with Dan were my investigations of and reporting on Warren, including her Native American problem.
With Warren back in the news because of Trump calling her Pocahontas, Dan invited me back on the show to explain to listeners the story of Elizabeth Warren’s Native American problem. So many people now only know soundbites about it they hear from the mainstream media.
I spend an “hour” with Dan on Tuesday night, November 28, 2017. The first few minutes dealt with whether calling Warren Pocahontas is a racial slur (it’s not, but it’s also not a term I use), and then my mini-lecture on the Warren Native American story starts at the 9:00 mark. The listener calls start at the 23:00 mark.
The audio is here, and also embedded below.
I mention the first post I ever wrote about Warren supposedly being Native American, and how the title of the post expressed my shock, Elizabeth Warren is what?
I also mentioned how Warren’s campaign admitted to me that she filled out her law school directory forms as Native American, Confirmed – Elizabeth Warren knowingly self-identified as Native American on law association forms. and Elizabeth Warren claims listed herself as minority to meet people, but story doesn’t hold up.
It’s too long for me to transcript the entire show, so here are some excerpts:
“That’s the key thing, she improved her chances [of being hired at a top law school]. In order to know whether it made a difference, we would have to see her hiring file, and she has never authorized, and Harvard and Penn have never released her hiring file, because that’s where you would find the information.”
* * *
“The fact that she went to Rutgers [Law School] to me is neither here nor there. Because if she were sufficiently accomplished, if she had the publications history, if she had all the other credentials, that wouldn’t necessarily hold her back. But that didn’t give her the right to juice her resume by calling herself a minority when she wasn’t a minority. That’s the offensive thing ….”
* * *
“Q. In your opinion, you’ve studied this as closely as anyone, did she use another culture to advance her chances of going up the academic ladder, if you will?A. There’s not question she did, and those [faculty] directories are the key. And the fact that people at Penn knew she was claiming to be Native American, and the fact that at Harvard they claimed she was a Woman of Color in Legal Academia. There were journals that listed her as the first woman of color …. Fordham Law Journal in 1997 listed her as Harvard Law School’s first woman of color on the faculty. So it appears that the people who did the hiring, the people in the know, knew that whatever she was or wasn’t, she was going to be able to be counted for their purposes, for their diversity purposes, as either Native American or a woman of color.And there is no question that that is a helpful category to have in a situation where there is an enormous pressure to increase the diversity of the faculty. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t qualified. All I’m saying is that if she was entitled to make those status claims, that’s one thing. But the problem is she wasn’t entitled to, and that’s really the problem, because she’s not Native American and she’s not a woman of color. She had no business appropriating those statuses in order to advance herself.”
* * *
“Q. My final question, is she still listed [that way] in the American Association of Law School faculty directory?A. I haven’t checked it recently, but I believe the evidence was that after she got tenure at Harvard, she stopped listing herself as a minority law teacher. And that is very, very telling. In some ways, that’s the most telling thing. Once she reached the highest run, I mean you can argue whether Yale is the better or Stanford or Harvard, but those are the top three. They’re always the top three. When you’re a tenured professor at one of those three law schools, you’ve reached the top rung. As soon as she reached the top rung of the law school ladder, she stopped claiming that minority status. And I think that says everything.”
* * *
“Harvard and Penn confirmed that they reported her as Native American for their EEOC reporting requirements. And the definition that the EEOC uses, and that Harvard uses, or at least we believe used at that time, they use it now, in order to be Native American you have to have two things. You both have to have the ancestry, and you have to have either tribal affiliation or community recognition. So you have to both genetically be Native American, and you have to have lived your life as a Native American. That’s the EEOC standard and the Harvard standard. That’s why, when a lot of these people say, oh well have her take a DNA test, that’s only part of the equation. Elizabeth Warren never to this day has affiliated with a tribe, never to this day has affiliated with any Native American group. When she registered with the Senate when she won, she didn’t even list herself as Native American. A lot of people don’t know that, I reported on that. So Elizabeth Warren never was Native American except in the hiring directory where it would advance her versus other people.”
Here’s the full audio. Can you handle a full hour of me?
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