Elizabeth Warren Attends Cambridge AAAA Meeting (Affirmative Action Abusers Anonymous)
By S.G. Lawrence BOSTON -While continuing its undercover investigation of the Cherokee roots of Massachusetts Senate Hopeful Candidate Elizabeth Warren, The Washington Fancy received a hot tip from a Boston Red Sox fan Friday evening, sending reporters disguised as Harvard alumni scurrying to the Cambridge Chapter of AAAA–Affirmative Action Abusers Anonymous–a newly formed nationwide support group for college professors and students suffering from the lifelong traumatic effects of having checked off “Native Indian” or “Hispanic or Latino” boxes on college, graduate school and employment application forms. Although many of the attendees gathered at the Brattle Street meeting location in Cambridge were eager to speak about their experiences at such illustrious institutions as Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, NYU School of Law and Stanford Business School, Harvard Law Professor Warren, the Democratic front-running candidate in the November 2012 Massachusetts Senatorial election, was demonstrably quiet and looking quite dejected as she clutched a copy of her best-selling book “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle Class Parents Are Going Broke.” Warren averted her eyes as participants came to the front of the room to talk about their experiences.
“I was at the top of my class at Ralph Waldo Emerson High School in Bethesda, Maryland,” said a tall blonde 30-something man with perfect creases on his suit’s pants, “and my guidance counselor assured me at the end of my junior year that I’d be a shoe-in for my top picks, Harvard and Brown. Ralph Waldo Emerson High was always at the top of U.S. News’s Best High Schools picks, and I took every AP class they offered, I took Mandarin Chinese and Arabic, I studied my ass off for the SAT’s and I did every known Community Service activity, I was on the Debate Team, the Lacrosse Team, and the Table Tennis Team, and I spent all my Spring Breaks volunteering for Save the Children in La Paz, Bolivia and Lima, Peru while my classmates goofed off and drove down to Fort Lauderdale. But when it came time to fill out all my college application forms in the fall of my senior year, I got really nervous after talking to a bunch of students from the previous year who were then college freshmen. I realized that the competition was really stiff and that I wasn’t going to get in to Harvard or Brown without something really spectacular to distinguish myself. So I decided to check off the box next to “Native American” because I remembered hearing when I was really young that our family’s roots went back a long way in the Chesapeake Bay area, and also I recalled that my grandmother always made Indian Pudding at Thanksgiving. I also figured that if I got in to Brown or Harvard, I’d probably meet a lot of people there with similar backgrounds to mine and that seemed comforting to me at the time. But ever since I got to Harvard, (and I got my J.D. at Harvard too), I’ve been racked with guilt, and when I took graduate seminars like “The Role of Race in 20th Century Supreme Court Opinions” in law school, I started to become really bothered by what I did. I’m having a lot of problems now coming to grips with the fact that I may have taken away opportunities for more deserving undergraduates and law students with actual Native American heritage. In fact, I just learned that Harvard Yard used to have a building called “Indian College” but that it was torn down in 1698 and never replaced. I just don’t know how I am going to reconcile what I’ve done with the fact that I’m now a practicing lawyer with degrees from Harvard, and I really scammed the system and nobody is going to believe that I achieved what I achieved on my own merit because of this potential stain on my reputation and character that I’ve kept hidden for so many years.”
Several other attendees rose to speak about checking off “Hispanic or Latino” under the box that said “Ethnic Origin” and others piled on about how they had checked off “American Indian/Alaskan Native” under the Race checkbox. Following each speaker at the hour-long AAAA meeting, an anonymous group leader rose from her seat in the front row and reassured everyone that no matter what they were experiencing and feeling, that they were not alone and that recovery was possible. Donations were accepted in a basket passed around at the end of the meeting and TWF’s reporters noticed that there were several pamphlets on a table by the door, including “Getting Through The Twelve Steps When You Have A Diversity Problem,” “Recovering From Affirmative Action Abuse With Dignity,” and “Accepting A Greater Power Over Your College Application Shame.”
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