Black ministers skeptical on Elizabeth Warren, want candidate meetings.

Black ministers skeptical on Elizabeth Warren, want candidate meetings.(BG).Dogged by weeks of questions about whether her claims of Native American heritage helped advance her career, Elizabeth Warren now faces skepticism from some of Boston’s black ministers whose appearance with Scott Brown just after his 2010 election to US Senate helped shape Brown’s image as a different breed of Republican. “It will take more than an impromptu endorsement by Governor Patrick to make an intellectually compelling case why Elizabeth Warren deserves to be the next senator,” said the Rev. Eugene F. Rivers III, referring to the state’s governor, Deval Patrick, who is black.
Rivers said he will ask Warren and Brown to meet with the black community to address its concerns. “The support she receives should be earned.” The pressure comes at a difficult time for Warren, a white Harvard Law bankruptcy professor who has spent five weeks deflecting criticism for identifying herself as having Native American heritage. Warren, a nationally known consumer advocate who led a federal oversight committee on bank bailout funds, has been unable to provide proof of her heritage and has been hounded by the suggestion that her minority status brought her a hiring preference, though Warren and some of her past employers have denied that. As a result, a hot-button issue of past decades — affirmative action — has taken center stage in a recession-era campaign that Warren had hoped to focus on defending the middle class. [...] But Rivers said the questions are legitimate and could affect Warren’s image in the black community and the public at large. “It is within bounds to raise the question of whether or not a white woman used the minority card for her professional advantage,” said Rivers. “Ancestry is not the issue,” Rivers added, saying that Warren’s handling of the controversy raises questions beyond her heritage.
“Did you tell the truth? Because you marketed yourself as the good-guy, straight-shooting-populist, representing-poor-people candidate.” “Affirmative action — that issue becomes important because it points to who you are,” added the Rev. Jeffrey Brown, executive director of the TenPoint Coalition, who pointed to an assertion that she is 1/32 Cherokee. “I’m thinking to myself, if I was 1/32 white, or of European descent, would I be able to put on an application that I was white? And if you look at a picture of me, you see what I’m talking about. The question is not a trivial one, or one that can just be dismissed as a Republican tactic. And I say this as someone who campaigned for Martha Coakley and I’m independent in terms of my political status.”Read the full story here.