After 7 years of not speaking during oral argument, Clarence Thomas spoke...

... and whatever he said was drowned out by the laughter of those in the room. 

Apparently, it was some kind of joke about what a Yale law degree connotes. We know how he feels about his law degree. Here's what I wrote back in 2007 when he gave an interview to "60 Minutes":

"I was never a liberal. I was radical," he says, talking about how difficult it was for him to go to work for a Republican after he graduated from Yale Law School. His Yale Law degree was worth almost nothing, he says. Though he graduated in the middle of his class, he couldn't get a job, and he was enraged to see that the degree meant one thing for whites and another for blacks. Everyone assumed he got into Yale because he was black, and not because he had grown up in severe hardship, and yet had always done well in every environment -- from all black to all white.

ADDED: According to the NYT, Thomas leaned over to the microphone and uttered a remark that the stenographer captured as "Well – he did not —." Laughter is noted. The topic at the time was the definition of constitutionally adequate counsel, and Justice Scalia had just noted that one lawyer had gone to Yale Law School and another to Harvard. Supposedly, according to some people who were in the courtroom, Thomas said something that meant that a law degree from Yale could be proof of incompetence.

[Thomas has] complained about the difficulty of getting a word in edgewise on an exceptionally voluble bench. The garbled transcript offers some support for that final rationale.

Indeed. On the other hand, the intense interest we're all showing now might encourage him. Say anything at all and it will be big news.

"I haven't been a black conservative since 1995..."

Glenn Loury talks about people he's known for 40 years who won't say hello, who won't look him in the eye because he USED TO BE a black conservative. USED TO BE! John McWhorter talks about those who think "it would be wrong to even print my name. They think of me as Satan. And that's just how it's been."



Much later in the diavlog, Loury and McWhorter weigh in on the affirmative action case that's pending in the Supreme Court. "Would you think it was a good thing if the Supreme Court outlawed racial preferences as we knew them?" McWhorter takes the "not nuanced" position that racial preferences should be proclaimed "obsolete." (Loury disagrees.)

Emily Yoffe asserts that I attacked her "as a tool of the racial and ethnic preference lobby."

She stands by her ethical advice to someone, but quite aside from my problem with that ethical advice, I'd like to say that it's unethical to portray what I said so inaccurately.

Here's the post I wrote, which isn't a general attack on her support for affirmative action. I was calling attention to the problem of incomplete honesty from those who seek to benefit from affirmative action and the way the school applying its policy has shared interests that cause it not to want to know about a false or misleading statement. This is the very issue that had been in the news with respect to Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren. The schools want to be able to say that they have a good proportion of minority students, so they may not mind if an applicant claims, based on family lore, to be a member of a minority group.

Yoffe professed not to notice any harm to anyone in this interaction between a school and an applicant. That was, at best, willfully blind. As an ethicist, she ought to want to address the larger problem. And now, after linking to me as she did, she has an ethical obligation toward me that needs some attention.

"The Shame of the Universities."

An alternate title that would work for 2 recently published books, according Michael Barone. (Both are books I've blogged about before: Greg Lukianoff's "Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate," and Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor's "Mismatch/How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.")

Via Instapundit, whose own "Shame of the Universities" book is referred to in Barone's article.

"Michigan’s ban on affirmative action in college admissions was declared unconstitutional Thursday..."

"... by a deeply divided federal appeals court, six years after state voters said race could not be an issue in choosing students."

In an 8-7 decision, the court said the 2006 amendment to the Michigan Constitution is illegal because it presents an extraordinary burden to opponents who would have to mount their own long, expensive campaign through the ballot box to protect affirmative action....

Linda Greenhouse is embarrassed for the Supreme Court and for Texas.

After reading/listening to the oral argument in Fisher v. University of Texas.

Roberts and Scalia were obviously trying "to make the university’s commitment to assembling a diverse student body look silly."

"So what you're saying is that what counts is race above all.... You want underprivileged of a certain race and privileged of a certain race. So that's race."

Said Justice Anthony Kennedy at during the oral argument over the the University of Texas affirmative action policy. UT, following state law, automatically admits everyone who graduates from a Texas high school in the top 10%, a colorblind policy that produces a certain amount of racial diversity, especially since there are many high schools in Texas that have a very high proportion of black or Hispanic students.

So why does UT do any additional affirmative action as it fills up the portion of the entering class not admitted through the 10% program? You've already got a lot of diversity, so why do you need more? The additional affirmative action is precisely to bring in privileged black and Hispanic students, that is, the black and Hispanic students who did not attend racially isolated schools. If white students get too many of the top 10% spots at those schools, then the 10% program does not bring enough of these minority students into UT.

The university says... that the highest-ranked students at a disadvantaged school have lower SAT scores than some in the middle of the pack at a more competitive suburban high school. UT's affirmative-action program aims to open doors for minority applicants from middle-class or professional families. Such students can "help dispel stereotypical assumptions…which actually may be reinforced" by minorities admitted only because of the top-10% plan, UT said in its brief.

Justice Samuel Alito seized on that point. "I thought that the whole purpose of affirmative action was to help students who come from underprivileged backgrounds, but you make a very different argument that I don't think I've ever seen before," he said.

Actually, under the Court's case law, the diversity that is considered a compelling interest (which is what the state needs to defend race discrimination) is not about boosting the underprivileged. In Grutter v. Bollinger, the majority approved of the idea of  assembling a class that includes "a 'critical mass' of minority students," which does not mean "racial balancing, which is patently unconstitutional" but is "defined by reference to the educational benefits that diversity is designed to produce."

These benefits are substantial. As the District Court emphasized, the Law School’s admissions policy promotes “cross-racial understanding,” helps to break down racial stereotypes, and “enables [students] to better understand persons of different races.”...These benefits are “important and laudable,” because “classroom discussion is livelier, more spirited, and simply more enlightening and interesting” when the students have “the greatest possible variety of backgrounds.” ...

The Law School does not premise its need for critical mass on “any belief that minority students always (or even consistently) express some characteristic minority viewpoint on any issue.”... To the contrary, diminishing the force of such stereotypes is both a crucial part of the Law School’s mission, and one that it cannot accomplish with only token numbers of minority students. Just as growing up in a particular region or having particular professional experiences is likely to affect an individual’s views, so too is one’s own, unique experience of being a racial minority in a society, like our own, in which race unfortunately still matters.

If it's about breaking down stereotypes, the 10% approach creates a problem: The minority students in the classroom tend to come from the racially isolated schools, the less privileged Texans. So, it seems, the additional affirmative action is needed to get a more varied group of minority students, in which case, the point is to bring in privileged minority students, because these are the students who — in Grutter terms — might provide the classroom benefit of teaching all the students that minority students don't have "some characteristic minority viewpoint."

Obviously, there were dissenting opinions in Grutter. For example, Justice Scalia scoffed at that idea of the compelling interest: The lesson taught by classroom diversity is "essentially the same lesson taught to (or rather learned by, for it cannot be 'taught' in the usual sense) people three feet shorter and twenty years younger than the full-grown adults at the University of Michigan Law School, in institutions ranging from Boy Scout troops to public-school kindergartens."

I'm not taking a position on whether UT's admissions policy is good or whether it's constitutional. (Do not assume you know what I think. You don't.) All I am saying is that if Grutter is to be applied (and not limited or overruled), an affirmative action program that's all about boosting the most privileged minority students actually makes sense.

Did Justice Alito not see that (or was he mainly expressing disapproval)? Here's his quote (along with Justice Kennedy's), put in context, beginning at page 43 of the PDF transcript:

JUSTICE ALITO: Well, I thought that the whole purpose of affirmative action was to help students who come from underprivileged backgrounds, but you make a very different argument that I don't think I've ever seen before. The top 10 percent plan admits lots of African Americans -- lots of Hispanics and a fair number of African Americans. But you say, well, it's -- it's faulty, because it doesn't admit enough African Americans and Hispanics who come from privileged backgrounds. And you specifically have the example of the child of successful professionals in Dallas. Now, that's your argument? If you have -­ you have an applicant whose parents are -- let's say they're -- one of them is a partner in your law firm in Texas, another one is a part -- is another corporate lawyer. They have income that puts them in the top 1 percent of earners in the country, and they have -­ parents both have graduate degrees. They deserve a leg-up against, let's say, an Asian or a white applicant whose parents are absolutely average in terms of education and income?

[GREGORY G. GARRE, counsel for the University of Texas]: No, Your Honor. And let me -­ let me answer the question. First of all, the example comes almost word for word from the Harvard plan that this Court approved in Grutter and that Justice Powell held out in Bakke.

JUSTICE ALITO: Well, how that question be no, because being an African American or being a Hispanic is a plus factor.

MR. GARRE: Because, Your Honor, our point is, is that we want minorities from different backgrounds. We go out of our way to recruit minorities from disadvantaged backgrounds.

JUSTICE KENNEDY: So what you're saying is that what counts is race above all.

MR. GARRE: No, Your Honor, what counts is different experiences -­

JUSTICE KENNEDY: Well, that's the necessary -- that's the necessary response to Justice Alito's question.

MR. GARRE: Well, Your Honor, what we want is different experiences that are going to -- that are going to come on campus -­

JUSTICE KENNEDY: You want underprivileged of a certain race and privileged of a certain race. So that's race.

MR. GARRE: No, Your Honors, it's -- it's not race. It's just the opposite. I mean, in the LUAC decision, for example, this Court said that failing to take into account differences among members of the same race does a disservice -­

JUSTICE KENNEDY: But the reason you're reaching for the privileged is so that members of that race who are privileged can be representative, and that's race. I just -­

MR. GARRE: It's -- it's members racial group, Your Honor, bringing different experiences. And to say that -- if you took group, if you had an admissions process that to admit from a -- people from a particular background or perspective, you would want people from different perspectives.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Counsel -­

MR. GARRE: And that's -- that's the interests that we're discussing here. It's the interests that the Harvard plan specifically adopts and lays out -­

"A lot of admissions officers tend to focus on how 'interesting' a student is."

"Being `interesting’ tends to be inversely related to being poor. Doing an internship in Indonesia is incompatible with holding a summer job."

With affirmative action, "rich students routinely get preference over more accomplished poor ones who do not happen to belong to" the "backward castes."

A NYT article displays sympathy to the victims of affirmative action... in India.

In Tamil Nadu, for instance, 69 percent of university admissions are now set aside for what the state has determined to be “backward castes.” Many of those favored with these set-asides have controlled Tamil Nadu’s government and much of its resources for generations, but they claim special status by pointing to a caste survey done in 1931....

Five prominent university officials in Tamil Nadu said in interviews that those given set-asides at their institutions were generally the children of doctors, lawyers and high-level bureaucrats. The result is that rich students routinely get preference over more accomplished poor ones who do not happen to belong to the favored castes. None of the officials would allow their names to be used for fear of angering the government ministers who benefit politically and personally from the program.

The "mismatch" argument against affirmative action.

Explained by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr.:

The mismatch effect happens when a school extends to a student such a large admissions preference — sometimes because of a student's athletic prowess or legacy connection to the school, but usually because of the student's race — that the student finds himself in a class where he has weaker academic preparation than nearly all of his classmates. The student who would flourish at, say, Wake Forest or the University of Richmond, instead finds himself at Duke, where the professors are not teaching at a pace designed for him —  they are teaching to the "middle" of the class, introducing terms and concepts at a speed that is unnerving even to the best-prepared student.

Read the whole thing. It's odd that these observations are surfacing so late in our experience with affirmative action, but there's a new case pending in the Supreme Court, which creates an occasion for elaborating the policy pros and cons. I remember discussions about affirmative action, back in the 1980s, in which any attempt to make this argument would provoke a sharp rebuke.

With striking uniformity, university leaders view discussion of the mismatch problem as a threat to affirmative action and to racial peace on campuses, and therefore a subject to be avoided. They suppress data and even often ostracize faculty who attempt to point out the seriousness of mismatch.

It's a painful thought, that you are hurting the people you meant to help. The urge to repress ensues. It's much easier to justify imposing a disadvantage on the people you decided could bear the burden. That's something academics have long felt comfortable discussing openly.

Will the Supreme Court affirmative action case force the presidential candidates to talk about...

... a subject both of them would prefer to avoid? The oral argument is October 10th.

“I’ve got to believe at this point in the campaign neither the president or Governor Romney is going to want to give a quote on any of this,” said Richard Taylor, a business diversity advocate and former Massachusetts transportation secretary under Romney. “If I was preparing either candidate for the debate, this would be on the checklist, … but I don’t think either campaign will be anxious to talk about it.”...

“It took three long years to pull [a federal government policy statement on the use of race in education] out of the Obama administration. It was only after we pestered and cajoled them that they finally got it out,” John Brittain, a civil rights activist and law professor at the University of the District of Columbia, said in an interview soon after the document was released. “The administration had a paralysis of analysis. …. Overall, the Obama administration just has a reluctance to take on race and equality, and when they do so everything is so carefully sanitized and scrubbed to make sure it’s the least offensive thing possible.”

There’s almost no chance that Romney would take a strong stance against affirmative action, according to Stuart Taylor, a veteran legal commentator and author of a new book on the policy.

... “No major national political figure has attacked affirmative action publicly since 1996 or before. It’s kind of remarkable. The Republicans who during the ’90s for a while were seeing some political profit in attacking affirmative action given the polls, don’t do it anymore.”

So both candidates — like many Americans — exhibit a bland, uncommitted acceptance of the long-term practice of affirmative action, and they don't want to have to talk about it in crisp, clear terms, looking at all the arguments for and against, and scrutinizing the constitutional texts and precedents. But that's exactly what the Supreme Court must do and will do on October 10th.

More debate — at the University of Wisconsin — about affirmative action.

You might remember last September, there was a huge crowd for a debate about affirmative action...

As Meade and I walked home, I called the students "admirable" for not getting out of hand and shouting down the speakers, and Meade made fun of my low standard. I said, "It's Wisconsin. Kudos for not rioting."

Earlier in the day, there was an outbreak of something that either was or was not violence, and students — mostly undergrad, not law students — were passionate but reasonably controlled at the debate later on. (Here's video I shot and edited.)

Tonight's debate, focusing on the pending Supreme Court case Texas v. Fisher, should be a more modest event — at the law school at 6:15. My colleague Larry Church will once again take the pro side on affirmative action, but he's got a different sparring partner, lawprof Rick Esenberg. Last year, the anti-affirmative action side was taken by Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, which was mounting an attack on the admissions policies at the University of Wisconsin. Fisher is about undergraduate admissions at the University of Texas.

Did Scott Brown staffers make anti-Indian gestures at a rally?

I'm not saying it was good or wise for them to make the "tomahawk chop" gesture while yelling in a way that the news report characterizes as an "Indian war whoop." And Scott Brown has said he doesn't condone that sort of acting out, but I just want to specify that the staffers' gesturing and noise-making doesn't count as antagonism toward Native Americans.

Someone doing the "tomahawk chop" is himself playing the role of Indian. This Indian character making a stereotypical gesture can't be read as expressing hostility toward Indians. The Indian is his hero. At a certain level of political correctness, the tomahawk chop is considered offensive to Native Americans, but somehow it's not offensive enough to have stopped Atlanta Braves fans from doing it.

Anyway, these fake Indians, the staffers, are pretending to be real Indians, miming an attack on Elizabeth Warren on the ground that she's a fake Indian. There's a lot of fakery in there, but no one is expressing the view that it's bad to be Indian. That's all I wanted to say, and I do understand how real Indians might prefer not to be represented as stereotypical characters. And maybe they'd object even more if a non-Indian got a great job from an employer who was practicing affirmative action in hiring or self-promoting by claiming diversity.

Liberals worry that Chief Justice John Roberts has built up political capital...

... which he will spend next term in what will be conservative decisions on things like affirmative action, voting rights, and same-sex marriage.

Tweeting with Taranto.

@jamestaranto That was a rounded-off number, kinda like saying you've got 25 more years to do affirmative action.

— Ann Althouse (@annalthouse) July 2, 2012

"Ann suggests that the Supreme Court striking down the law might help Obama's political fortunes."

"Glenn [Loury] disputes this, while observing that conservatives have certainly benefited over the years from the Court's pro-abortion rulings. They discuss the uproar over Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren's Native American ancestry, and, invoking the career of Justice Clarence Thomas, debate the politics of affirmative action. Responding to the failed attempt to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Ann thinks her formerly blue state is turning redder by the day. Glenn defends and Ann criticizes efforts to promote public employment during this recession."

Here's the whole 40-minute discussion:



IN THE COMMENTS: Chip S. said:

I was surprised that Loury defended Warren so much.

His career exemplifies what's best about affirmative action: Making an extra effort to find people with potential who would otherwise be overlooked.

Hers exemplifies the worst aspects of affirmative action: A cynical numbers game that doesn't benefit anyone whose light is actually hidden under a bushel.

As Glenn tells his own story — growing up poor on the south side of Chicago — he would be someone a law school admissions committee would pick out for multiple factors and not a simple race-balancing, box-checking approach to affirmative action. And unlike Elizabeth Warren and other individuals with a claim to some Native American ancestry, Glenn does not have the power to check and uncheck the box depending on whether or not an advantage is available. He can't be creative about his conception of himself when it comes to race.

"If only [racial] change were as swift and simple as a child’s dance recital."

Here's a second article about race giving central, front-page attention on the NYT website this morning. (The previous post discusses the first.)

Reaching out longingly to female readers, this article features a picture of adorable kindergarten girls in pink tutus and white tutus... and — mostly — nonwhite skin. It's a performing arts magnet school, and the serious topic of the article is the federal grant program, dating back to the 1980s, that supposedly helps with racial integration.

The idea was to create a themed curriculum that attracted children from outside a school’s immediate neighborhood to reduce the isolation of one minority group....

About 58 percent of the students in District 14 public schools are Hispanic, 26 percent are black, 12 percent are white and 3 percent are Asian, according to the Education Department. At each of these four elementary magnet schools, Hispanic students represent more than 70 percent of the population.

These are the wrong percentages, for some reason that is supposed to be obvious to you, and the promise of putting their little girls in tutus is intended to lure white parents into doing what the government deems valuable, diluting the minority population. We are assured that "decades of research studies show that children perform better in integrated schools," and then there's much talk about the magnet schools hitting academic targets. But the tutu school in the photo is under investigation for cheating
(because kids did so well on the tests at the school, but badly when they moved on to middle school).

Complicating desegregation even further: a 2007 United States Supreme Court ruling that restricted schools in selecting students. The court, in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, ruled 5 to 4 that schools could not explicitly take race into account when selecting students.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who voted with the majority, nevertheless kept alive the importance of school integration: in a separate opinion, he wrote that school districts could be creative, perhaps reconfiguring attendance zones to spur socioeconomic diversity....

Historically for magnet schools, white middle-class students have been the prize. Despite the odds, one of the Williamsburg schools has been able to attract them in droves.....

Education officials placed Brooklyn Arbor [Public School 414] in a prime location to draw families from the Northside neighborhood: just south of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, near the trendier parts of Williamsburg. The new principal, Eva Irizarry, did the rest. Her aggressive recruiting and her commitment to progressive, hands-on learning helped persuade white middle-class families to try the new school.... [The school's theme is] global and ethical studies. Ms. Irizarry plans to build eco-friendly classrooms and a greenhouse on the roof...

When it came to recruiting, Ms. Irizarry said, she got no response when she went to Head Start nursery schools in the surrounding Dominican neighborhoods.

She had more success pitching a new concept to Northside parents. At Mommy and Me yoga classes, she left brochures that featured the school’s carefully designed green tree logo and 13 children of all ethnicities photographed in green T-shirts....

Ms. Irizarry... was concerned that Hispanic parents might feel they were being pushed out of the school.

White middle-class students have been the prize.... the trendier parts of Williamsburg... commitment to progressive... learning.... So the success of the project is measured in terms of how many white kids enroll, and the theme is designed to appeal to white people... But it's the presence of white people that "decades of research studies show" is what's really best for the nonwhite kids.

Here's the Parents Involved case, in the event that you'd like to brush up on the constitutional law. The Supreme Court has been clear that racial balancing is not an acceptable basis for classifying individuals by race. Diversity — which is — has a different meaning, and, to keep this post from getting much longer, I'll just say the Court has struggled to define diversity and what may be done to achieve it.

Whatever the law says, there are still policy decisions to be made, and here, I'm puzzling over the paradoxical high valuation of white children and their use for dilution purposes.

Elizabeth Warren says — for the first time — that she told Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania that she was Native American.

Boston Globe reports:

Federal statistics like those in the Harvard records, which were compiled for the Department of Labor, rely on a definition of “Native American’’ that requires both ancestry and an official affiliation with a tribe or community. The 1992-93 and 1995-96 Harvard reports indicate the university relied on that definition during those years as well as the years since.

Warren has not met any of those standards. Though she continues to consider herself Native American, she has not provided any genealogical evidence....

Professor Charles Fried, who sat on the committee that recruited Warren, reiterated to the Globe on Wednesday that he was unaware of Warren’s minority status when she was hired. He said that the committee never discussed it and that he does not consult the legal directory in which Warren had listed herself as a minority.

However, Fried acknowledged Wednesday to the Globe, it seemed strange that the issue of her heritage would not come up during the hiring process since she was recruited in the early 1990s, when the school was under intense pressure to diversify its faculty....

For at least 6 years, during Elizabeth Warren's tenure at Harvard Law School, Harvard University reported that there was a Native American woman at the law school.

Boston Globe reports on documents Harvard filed with the federal government:

The US Department of Labor requires large employers to collect diversity statistics annually and suggests they be based on employees’ classification of themselves. In cases in which employees do not self-identify, federal regulations allow some administrators to make judgment calls on the correct categories using “employment records or observer identification.’’

The administrator responsible for Harvard Law School’s faculty diversity statistics from 1996 to 2004, the period in question, was Alan Ray, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation who, like Warren, has fair skin, blue eyes, and Oklahoma roots.

But Ray, now president of Elmhurst College in Illinois, said in a statement that he “did not encourage the Law School to list any faculty member as one particular race or ethnicity, including Professor Warren.’’ He further said through a spokeswoman that he “never encouraged any faculty member to list himself or herself in a particular way.’’ Ray added that Harvard “always accepted whatever identification a faculty member wanted to provide,’’ a characterization another highly placed former Harvard administrator backed up.

The linked article also recounts the history of Harvard Law's perceived diversity problem circa 1990, just before Warren arrived. Lawprof Derrick Bell had gone on "strike" (unpaid leave) to protest, some students brought a lawsuit (unsuccessful), and the U.S. Department of Labor audited what the article calls "Harvard's diversity practices" and found 10 violations. Warren arrived in 1992 (as a visiting professor), at which point she "had been listing herself for seven years as a minority in a legal directory often used by law recruiters to make diversity-friendly hires." She was still on that list when Harvard Law gave her a permanent position in 1995.

In 1996, law school news director Mike Chmura, speaking to the Harvard Crimson, identified Warren as a Native American professor.

In 1997, the Fordham Law Review, citing Chmura, referred to Warren as Harvard Law’s “first woman of color.’’

I find it hard to believe that — after all the uproar over diversity in 1990 — that the law school could quietly pass off Warren as its "first woman of color." There were so many people who were genuinely angry over the lack of diversity. Why would they have tolerated the school making such a lame assertion? Wouldn't they have wanted to keep up the pressure? If you were at Harvard in the 1990s, what do you remember about this?

The Globe article has more detail about Harvard's "affirmative action plan," a 1999 document, which "lists one Native American senior professor at the entire university," and, in a section on the law school, specifies that there is "a single Native American senior professor." This must be Warren, right? But this document also defines Native American in a way that would not include Warren: "a person having origins in any of the original peoples of North America and who maintains cultural identification through tribal affiliation or community recognition."

The inference is that Harvard itself lied on diversity documents filed with the federal government (and posted on line for years).  Note that this information is used to recruit students, some of whom may care a great deal about whether there are faculty who seem as though they will be special mentors. I wonder whether there were students who chose Harvard and sought out Warren as a mentor because of her perceived status as a Native American.

There's something very odd here. A lot of things, actually. This isn't just about whether Elizabeth Warren is a worthy candidate for the U.S. Senate. This is about more general chicanery about diversity at Harvard and even more general deception and manipulation in the politics of diversity.

Elizabeth Warren accuses Scott Brown of having "launched attacks on [her] family."

These "attacks" consist of the questions about her claimed Native American ancestry (and whether she has sought or received special benefits because of that). How do these questions constitute "attacks on [her] family"? Here's the quote, answering the question how she knows she is Native American:

"Because my mother told me so. This is how I live. My mother, my grandmother, my family. This is my family. Scott Brown has launched attacks on my family. I am not backing off from my family.”

So it seems the argument is: She believes something she heard from her family, and if you question the factual soundness of what she believes — or ask additional questions about the consequences of the fact believed — that you are attacking her family.

Does that make any sense? It makes a little sense to say: Hey, this is a family story, and it means a lot to us, among ourselves, and it's unkind of you to intrude into our very personal intimacies. You are attacking the cozy warmth within our home. That would make sense if it were irrelevant whether she were Native American or not. It could just be something you believe, like you believe your father loved your mother or that you were the cutest little baby in the world. You're not arrogant or a fool for believing things like that and never inquiring more deeply, and a political opponent or a reporter that gets all pushy about the factual content of such beliefs is a big clod and could be told so.

But... if you sought career advancement by making a claim that was not factually grounded, then it is relevant as you seek political office. It goes to your character, your honesty, your fairness. Now, it might nevertheless be something of an answer to the question to say: You know, I now realize that I didn't have an absolutely sound basis to believe what I believed, but I did genuinely believe it. And I know that I did expose this belief in a way that could have attracted benefits, and I did come to regret it. I've forgiven myself, and I ask you to forgive me, because my mistake was a daughter's belief in what her mother told her was true, a granddaughter's belief in her grandmother's knowledge and honor.

If she came that far, and Scott Brown were to respond: Your mother and your grandmother were either liars or fools — that would be an attack on her family.

That hasn't happened, and who can imagine it would? Thus, the inappropriate attack here is on Scott Brown, because he has not attacked her family.