Blue Corn Comics -- Stereotype of the Month Entry

Stereotype of the Month Entry
(6/3/05)

Friday, June 03, 2005

Five or six years ago, I was walking back to my office with a student, discussing a paper she had recently submitted. It emerged during our conversation that she had been invited to apply for a summer internship in Washington, D.C. — good pay, comfortable accommodations, interesting work. This aroused my curiosity.

The young woman in question undeniably possessed a shrewd, agile brain, but had never displayed any depth of intellectual interests. I asked her how she came to receive such an invitation. She explained that she was part American Indian. There before me was a pair of vivid blues eyes, authentically golden hair and a classic peaches-and-cream complexion. I am describing a blonde, a perfect blonde, the Platonic ideal of a blonde made flesh. I approached the obvious question with my customary tact.

"You sure as hell don't look Indian," I said.

So she went out to her car, fetched her purse and produced a card issued by the Taliquah Agency of the Department of Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs. This card officially certified my student as 3/127th or 3/128th Cherokee, I do not remember exactly. Her mother, she explained, had gone through an involved and a time-consuming process to acquire this credential.

A credential for what? Presumably the inviting agency considered her credentialed to diversify some federal bureau with a small sliver of Cherokee culture. What could they have had in mind? Did they expect her to broaden the employee's cultural horizons with a feathered headdress? Perhaps they hoped that she would teach them how to supplement inter-agency memos with smoke signals?

I read somewhere that the Mashantucket Pequots accept you as a tribal member qualified to share in the profits of their Foxwood casino if you can prove one-sixteenth Pequot descent. This is more understandable. They need a tribe to have a reservation, so there is an urgent need to annex members from the surrounding population. Presumably there are not enough one-eighth, one-quarter and one-half Pequots to add up to a plausible number.

I happen to be one-sixteenth Norwegian, or so I have been told. Condemn me for rejecting my roots if you will, but I make no claim of Viking heritage.

I have never had the urge to sail up the Kennebec River in a longboat with a horned helmet on my head and a salted herring clenched in my teeth — all eager and agog to loot and torch Waterville and molest the Colby girls. Call me a self-hating Norwegian if you like. I only state the plain facts. I would not say no if the government of Norway offered me a share of that country's offshore gas and oil revenues, but I am unable to claim any cultural affinity with Hagar the Horrible.

Unless there is some branch of anthropology or sociology that has developed a technique for tracing cultural inheritances through multiple generations, these "diversity" classifications appear to be purely racist in origin.

The Nazi Law of the Protection of German Blood and Honor with it supplements, more commonly known as the Nuremberg Laws, never made such fine distinctions as those that are now becoming the American practice. One-sixteenth Jewish parentage and you were legally German, the same as any other Aryan unless you volunteered for the SS, which imposed more exacting standards. The Nazis acknowledged a cultural element in determining whether a person was a first-, second- or third-degree Mischling (mongrel). A person's status could be altered if he "looked" or "acted" Jewish.

That brings us to the case of Professor Ward Churchill, which has attracted national attention lately. It turns out that the man is less Indian than I am Norwegian. He is not even entitled to a card officially certifying him as 1/127th Cherokee. Yet he was tenured as an ethnic studies professor at the University of Colorado and became chairmammal of its Ethnic Studies Department because he "acted" Indian. At Colorado, this apparently means growing your hair long, scowling a lot and damning the wicked white man.

In 1977, I became an Indian with even less effort. I simply filled out the Affirmative Action Office's form, identifying myself as an Aleutian Indian devoted to the Druid religion. No official ever came around to query the marks of my Aleut heritage. No committee was ever convened to determine whether I adhered to the Druidical custom of burning human sacrifices in wicker cages.

From the following year to of my retirement in spring 2004, the Middlesex County College annual report recorded an "Asian-Pacific Islander" representation on the institution's staff. This might have referred to me, or it might not. I thought it best not to probe the matter.

The policy of racial classification being adopted in the name of diversity really requires more system. The diversitarians might find the Nuremberg Laws a useful model. They were not benevolent, scientific or philosophically coherent, but they were systematic.

Rob's reply
>> A credential for what? Presumably the inviting agency considered her credentialed to diversify some federal bureau with a small sliver of Cherokee culture. <<

Or a Cherokee viewpoint, more likely.

>> What could they have had in mind? Did they expect her to broaden the employee's cultural horizons with a feathered headdress? Perhaps they hoped that she would teach them how to supplement inter-agency memos with smoke signals? <<

That's two stereotypes in two sentences for Frary.

What does any organization hope to gain from a diversity program? Alternative perspectives from the people who have them, I presume. A Cherokee from Oklahoma could tell a federal agency loads about the conditions at home—things that bureaucrats in plush Washington offices could never imagine.

Knowledge and understanding is what an organization seeks from a diversity program, not exotic clothing or customs.

>> I read somewhere that the Mashantucket Pequots accept you as a tribal member qualified to share in the profits of their Foxwood casino if you can prove one-sixteenth Pequot descent. This is more understandable. They need a tribe to have a reservation, so there is an urgent need to annex members from the surrounding population. <<

The Pequots already have a reservation. They don't need some minimum number of people to maintain that reservation.

A tribe enrolls new people to keep its traditions and culture alive.

>> Unless there is some branch of anthropology or sociology that has developed a technique for tracing cultural inheritances through multiple generations, these "diversity" classifications appear to be purely racist in origin. <<

This is an inane comment for several reasons.

One, tribes don't have to defer to anthropologists or sociologists in determining their membership. If some social scientist disagrees with a tribe's decisions, the tribe can implement them anyway.

Two, no elaborate "technique" would be required to trace someone's "cultural inheritances." By simply talking to potential enrollees, you could find out how much cultural knowledge they had learned from their tribal ancestors.

Three and most important, tribal membership is a political decision, not a racial one. Frary's main example proves the point. A Cherokee tribe was willing to enroll someone who was 3/128^th Cherokee by blood. This person was largely non-Indian racially, but the tribe deemed her an Indian culturally. It made a political decision, not a racial one, to enroll her as a member.

>> Yet he was tenured as an ethnic studies professor at the University of Colorado and became chairmammal of its Ethnic Studies Department because he "acted" Indian. At Colorado, this apparently means growing your hair long, scowling a lot and damning the wicked white man. <<

Wrong. Churchill has claimed he's an Indian by several criteria. The university may not have investigated his claims thoroughly enough, but it didn't hire him because of his hair or scowl.

>> In 1977, I became an Indian with even less effort. I simply filled out the Affirmative Action Office's form, identifying myself as an Aleutian Indian devoted to the Druid religion. <<

Another inane and erroneous comment. Frary may have become a prankster or a scofflaw, but he didn't become an Indian.

Besides, Aleutians aren't Indians, strictly speaking. They fall into the Native Alaskan and Aleutian category. This category is related to American Indian, but it's not the same thing.

>> No official ever came around to query the marks of my Aleut heritage. No committee was ever convened to determine whether I adhered to the Druidical custom of burning human sacrifices in wicker cages. <<

Although Frary blames it on the Druid religion, note the implication that a non-European would do something as primitive and barbaric as a human sacrifice.

>> From the following year to of my retirement in spring 2004, the Middlesex County College annual report recorded an "Asian-Pacific Islander" representation on the institution's staff. This might have referred to me, or it might not. <<

So Frary doesn't know if his silly experiment worked or not. If it did work, I suspected he violated a law by providing false information to a federal agency.

>> The policy of racial classification being adopted in the name of diversity really requires more system. <<

If an agency is seeking Indian interns whether they're enrolled or not, that is indeed a racial choice. The agency is presumably seeking racial diversity through an affirmative action program. The justification for having affirmative action is beyond the scope of this argument, but it exists.

But if the agency is seeking only enrolled Indian interns, that's a political choice. It's equivalent to a college's seeking a certain number of in-state and out-of-state students. Or to the military academies' practice of accepting two cadets from each state. That is a pure quota based on political citizenship, not on racial classification and certainly not on merit.

>> The diversitarians might find the Nuremberg Laws a useful model. <<

The non-diversitarians might find the laws of pre-Civil War America a useful model. Let's see...with nothing to encourage or discourage racial diversity, whites regularly oppressed, enslaved, or killed its minorities. The epitome of this law was the Dred Scot decision, which forced officials to return runaway slaves to their masters.

Yeah, that free-market system, with its complete lack of government regulation, sure worked well in promoting diversity...not.

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