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You Gotta Have a Narrative

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  May 18th, 2012 at 05:03 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

As long as our system rewards an interesting personal narrative over character, achievement or intelligence, we will have a problem with people embellishing their resumes to gain an advantage.

Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren are only the most recent examples.

The yellowed Hawaiian newspaper clipping is good enough for me. Obama is a natural-born American citizen. But to Occidental, Columbia and Harvard, the story of a Kenyan birth made a more interesting story than the story of an upper-middle class kid who was raised in Hawaii by his grandparents.

It’s a disease that is especially noticeable in higher education. When my daughter applied to a selective midwestern liberal arts college, we received a copy of a recruiting pamphlet the school published: “Meet the Class of 200X”. It detailed a dozen or so profiles of entering freshmen from the preceding class. It became a running joke in our family.

One kid spent a summer in high school nursing baby wildebeests back to health in the Serengeti.

Another helped his family build a log cabin in Honduras using hand tools only.

Another swam the Amazon while researching indigenous tribal music.

At the elite institutions, it’s no longer enough to have high board scores, an impressive high school GPA and a leadership position on the Student Council.

Ya gotta have game. Ya gotta have a narrative. The system knows this, abets it and helps in its manufacture. Nobody audits, nobody checks, because in the end, nobody cares. The school just passes along what it’s been told.

The only people it hurts are the ones that are stupid enough to stick with the literal truth.

We saw it on a small scale with our daughter. While being lauded for her achievements at her graduation from her small high school, the headmaster told of the hours that Junior had spent volunteering at a retirement home. I wish she had, but it wasn’t really true.

I’m sure there are a lot of kids out there with wonderful stories to tell of overcoming hardship and adversity, or taking on an unusual challenge. But as long as the system rewards stories of an exotic origin, or 1/32 ancestry in an oppressed minority, there will be embellishment.

As I learned in my youth, “The first liar doesn’t have a chance.”

Cross-posted at SteveMaley.com.

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  • dennism

    Mrs. Dennism’s uncle died a few weeks ago. A redhead, kinky-haired, green-eyed, fair complected freckled Cherokee. It’s so common in Oklahoma – the Cherokee treated a lot of white men as tribal members. My ex partner thought maybe someone in his family tree was Native American, of course, he never thought that might be so until his kids got college age and he was needing to find a ticket for them.

    It’s pretty easy to be cynical about Native Americans here (Oklahoma) but if there’s something set aside for Indians, dang it, it ought to go to an Indian. Ms Warren is from Okla City so I’ve had some rooting interest in seeing her do well, but yuck…

    • http://stevemaley.com Steve Maley

      I remember Dad asking an Indian woman for her recipe for delicious “squaw bread”. Went something like this: First you take two cups of Bisquik…

      Now it appears Dr Warren lifted one of her Pow Wow Chow recipes verbatim from the NYT. Should have been fishy that OK Cherokees would have a recipe that called for crabmeat.

      Henry Louis Gates does a DNA test on his PBS show that can determine ones share of Native American, African and European heritage. Many of the American blacks he’s tested think they’re about 25% Indian, but most of them are wrong.

      Also, these people that have a nebulous claim on Indian heritage always seem to be part Cherokee, not Navajo or Kickapoo or Chickasaw. I wonder why that is?

      • dennism

        Some tables of tribal populations…

        http://www.wildapache.net/NativeAmericanSite/pages/NApopulation.html

        Cherokee is the largest tribe, so it stands to reason more people would claim Cherokee blood. Will Rogers was (I seem to remember) half Cherokee. Part of the reason the tribe is so large is that they treated men with Cherokee wives as Cherokee. I’m inclined to say that’s true of their slaves, too, but I’m not sure.

        My next door neighbor lady died a couple of years ago. Her family honored her Cherokee heritage. We lived next door to her 35 years and had no idea. It’s easy not to know.

        Also, there’s a kind of ugly component. I think some Cherokees sort of look down their noses at some of the more primitive plains tribes. I could be wrong but in my youff I’m pretty sure that I heard a Cherokee refer to the Osage as “n****r Indians.” The Osage had oil income, the Cherokee didn’t have anything.

        There’s been an effort here in the last couple of years for the Seminole to expel all their black-skinned members. Which is funny because (I think I’m right) there never was a Seminole tribe, just a loose affiliation of people that ranaway and lived in the Florida swamps. Red and yellow black and white.

        If Ms Warren had claimed to be Seminole I might have believed it, but she looks like she belongs on the Swedish ski team.

        • gekster

          to see that body in a skin tight ski suit?
          Not me, not today, not any day.

        • http://stevemaley.com Steve Maley

          … who are descended from the Cherokees’ slaves.

          Scott Brown’s campaign should look into whether Warren’s 1/32 ancestor was a slave owner. Something tells me they have already.

          It was interesting that Dr Warren’s best claim on Indian ancestry was that g-g-grandpa had high cheekbones. Is a stereotypical trait sufficient to claim lineage?

          Grandad was thrifty — I must be Scottish.
          On the other side, Grandma had a great sense of rhythm. Can my kids claim minority status when they apply to Harvard?

          • Jack_Savage

            Particularly the ones up north.

  • texashistorian

    I see it all the time, particularly in who my institution chooses to celebrate and highlight in terms of achievement. It is almost never the student that comes from a quiet, “typical” American background (squishy definition, yes, but think things like white, reasonably well-to-do, perhaps church involvment, or Scouts). Rather, it is the ‘compelling’ personal story- the Indian biochem major who was inspired by the santiation conditions in his home village, the child of immigrant parents (read: illegals from Mexico) who is going into law to help those like her, blah blah blah.

    Every one, of course is attached to some big leftist cause whether its illegal alien rights, “green” technology, promoting diversity, GLBT issues, etc.