Warren’s choice on race

So it turns out that Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren listed herself as a Native American when she taught at the University of Pennsylvania law school. And now GOP incumbent Scott Brown has called on Warren to authorize the release of her university personnel records to see whether she used her ethnicity to get the Penn job or her current post at Harvard.

Should we care? Yes, but not for the reasons Brown assumes. Despite his suggestion that Warren was working some kind of affirmative-action scam, there's simply no evidence that her avowed Native American heritage affected her professional trajectory.

But this story is important, nevertheless, for what it tells us about contemporary America. Like Warren, more of us are choosing new racial identities or — more commonly — mixed ones. That's good news, because it reminds us that "race" itself is a fiction. It exists, of course, but only in our minds.

And in the white mind of 100 years ago, Native Americans were savages. "They have got as far as they can go, because they hold their land in common," declared Henry Dawes, himself a senator from Massachusetts.

So Dawes sponsored legislation to carve up tribal lands into privately owned plots to be allotted to Native Americans — if the government could identify them. Federal agents interviewed thousands of Native Americans about their family histories, which often included racial intermarriages and forced relocations. From that evidence, the government established a "blood quanta" for each Native American: full, one-half, one-quarter, and so on.

This calculation was always a guessing game. When the U.S. census tried to count Native Americans in 1910, it declared that anyone with "an appreciable amount of Indian blood" should be identified as Indian, "even though the proportion of white blood may exceed that of Indian blood." But census enumerators didn't look at "blood," of course; they mostly looked at people's faces, which allegedly revealed their race.

Only in 1960 would the census allow respondents to identify their race on their own. And the number of Native Americans skyrocketed almost 50 percent, showing that many more people thought they were Indians than census officials had believed.

In 2000, when the census allowed people to claim two or more races, 39 percent of Native Americans did so; by 2010, that fraction had climbed to 44 percent. Among the Cherokee, the nation's largest tribe, 65 percent identify with another race.

That's also the chosen tribe of Warren, who said family lore — and her grandfather's "high cheekbones" — tied her to the Cherokee. We'll never know Warren's "real" race, of course. And that's precisely the point. In 1907, when the federal government released its final tally of Cherokee, only 28 percent were deemed "full-blood." Even a century ago, most of the officially recognized Indians were already mixed up with others.

And if you go back far enough, all of us are. The language of race is biological, unfortunately, and it's also binary: you're either X or Y, but never both. History tells another story altogether. Most African Americans have at least 12.5 percent European ancestry, the equivalent of one white great-grandparent; by that measure, they're much more "white" than Warren is "Indian." We just don't like to talk about it.

But even that's changing. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of Americans identifying as more than one race jumped 32 percent. It's still only nine million people, or 2.9 percent of the country. Yet the trend seems stronger among younger Americans, who are less caught up in rigid racial definitions.

And that bodes well for a more just and equitable future, when more Americans will be free to express their race as they wish. Right now, that's a lot easier to do if you're white than if you're not. And it's definitely easier if you're a tenured law professor at Harvard, like Warren. Instead of raking her over the coals, let's try to give others the same choice she had.

E-mail Jonathan Zimmerman at Jlzimm@aol.com.