Sometimes a trivial embarrassment can become a teachable
moment. It was recently revealed that Harvard professor and U.S. Senate
candidate Elizabeth Warren had self-identified as a Native American for nearly
a decade — apparently to enhance her academic career by claiming minority
status. Warren, a blond multimillionaire, could not substantiate her claim of
1/32 Cherokee heritage. (And would it have reflected any better on her if she
could have?) Instead, she fell back on the stereotyped caricature that a relative
of hers had “high cheekbones.”
Not long ago, University of Colorado academic Ward
Churchill was likewise exposed as a fraud in his claims of Native American
ancestry. This racial con artist was able to fabricate an entire minority
identity and parlay it into an activist professorship that otherwise would not
have been possible for a white male of his limited talent.
In the Trayvon Martin murder case, the media was intent
on promulgating a white-oppressor/black-victim narrative as proof of the endemic
white prejudice that still haunts America and requires perpetual recompense.
However, a glitch arose when it was learned that
Zimmerman had a Peruvian mother. By university and government diversity
standards, he could be characterized as a “minority.” That bothersome fact
threatened to undermine the entire hyped narrative of white-on-black crime. So
the panicked media coined a new hybrid term for Zimmerman: “white Hispanic.”
Note that the media has so far not in commensurate
fashion referred to President Obama as a “white African-American” even though
he, too, had a white parent. In Obama’s memoirs, we learn that well into his
20s he self-identified as “Barry.” Only later did Obama begin using his African
name, Barack, which at some key juncture offered a more valuable cachet than
did the suburban-sounding “Barry.”
Is there anything wrong with such chameleon-like
self-identification in an age when universities are full of hyphenated
careerists and newscasters awkwardly trill their names to remind us of their
particular ethnicity?
In the last 50 years, massive immigration from Asia,
Africa, and Latin America, coupled with rapid rates of integration and
intermarriage, have created a truly multiracial society. So-called whites, for
example, are now a minority of the population in California, and millions of
people of mixed ancestry don’t identify with any particular ethnic group.
Does a Joe Lopez, the son of a white mother and a
Hispanic father, “count” as Hispanic while a Joe Schmidt, the son of a Hispanic
mother and a white father, does not? What about a José Schmidt?
For that answer, ask George Zimmerman. Had he applied for
college admission or a certain type of job, a politically correct university or
an employer pressed to meet diversity quotas mostly certainly would have dubbed
Zimmerman “Hispanic.”
Identities, in psychodramatic fashion, are sometimes put
on and taken off, like clothes, as self-interest dictates — given that so often
they are no longer ascertainable from appearance. If that sounds crass or
unfair, ask Elizabeth Warren, who dropped her Native American claims as soon as
she at last received tenure and found her 1/32 con suddenly superfluous — to
the apparent unconcern of her similarly cynical but now mum employer, Harvard.
Nor is race sure proof of either poverty or past
oppression. Asian Americans, for example, have a median family income more than
$10,000 a year higher than that of white Americans. And if pigmentation is
proof of ongoing prejudice, why don’t darker Punjabis and Arabs — who do not
qualify for special racial preferences — deserve consideration over those
lighter-skinned minorities who do?
How long after a Mexican national crossed the border
would he become a Chicano eligible for affirmative action? Do Attorney General
Eric Holder’s children qualify? Do 1/32 (one great-great-great grandparent) or
1/16 (one great-great grandparent) Cherokees receive preferential treatment?
And if so, who administers this odious Jim Crow one-drop DNA test, and how?
In truth, after a half-century in our self-created racial
labyrinth, no one quite knows who qualifies as an oppressed victim or why —
only that the more one can change a name or emphasize lineage, the better the
careerist edge. The real worry is that soon we will have so many
recompense-seeking victims that we will run out of concession-granting
oppressors.
How odd (or rather, how predictable) that something that
started out as a supposedly noble lie — that to atone for past bias we must be
judged by the color of our skin rather than the content of our character — has
become utterly ignoble and beneath us.
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