Self Identification As Another Race

My passing comment in another post about Canadian icon Buffy Sainte-Marie's claim to be a native indigenous American being challenged ...

Buffy Sainte Marie - Sesame Street

..... ended with me asking why so many white women make these sorts of claims. 

She is or was an icon as the only indigenous person to win an Academy Award, and had a five-year stint on the children's show Sesame Street, explaining native Cree culture. In this case of self identification, its now claimed that she is actually Beverley Jean Santamaria, and was born to Albert and Winifred Santamaria, a couple from Italy with mostly English ancestry.

She is now prevaricating "What I've always been honest about is that I don't know where I'm from or who my birth parents were" (Q: So why claim to be an indigenous native?) .... and muddying up the tale ... her "growing-up mother" (aka her mother) had told her many things "including that I was adopted and that I was native but there was no documentation as was common for indigenous children born in the 1940s." Finishing with "I may not know where I was born, but I know who I am."  .... Hmm ... believe what you want!!

Caryn Elaine Johnson aka Whoopi Goldberg

Then there is the black actress Caryn Elaine Johnson, aka Whoopi Goldberg whose claim to be Jewish has been questioned and was apparently also disabused by her mother Emma, who has been reported as saying that they had thought that the family's original surname (Johnson) was "not Jewish enough" for her daughter to become a TV/film star, so they picked the stage name 'Goldberg'. 

A researcher, Henry Louis Gates Jr. has also found that all of Ms Johnson's (Goldberg) traceable ancestors were African Americans, and that she had no known German or Jewish ancestry, with none of her ancestors being named Goldberg. This lack of Jewishness was reinforced by the results of a DNA test, carried out in 2006 for a Public Broadcast Service documentary, called African American Lives, which traced a very large part of her ancestry to the Papel and Bayote people of modern-day Guinea-Bissau in Sub Saharan Africa (92 per cent), with just 8 per cent of European origin.

Iron Eye Cody aka Espera Oscar de Corti

I am also thinking of other women (and famously one male actor, Espera Oscar de Corti aka 'Chief Iron Eyes Cody' on TV - who eventually refused to admit he was Sicilian), such as false 'Black activist', Rachel Anne Dolezal who was found to be white, or US politician Elizabeth Warren who in 1984, contributed recipes to a Native American cookbook and identified herself as Cherokee (First Nation American).

Elizabeth Warren - Not First Nation?

Ms Warren said that "being Native American has been part of my story, I guess, since the day I was born" .... of course this later proved to be largely false (DNA found that Warren's ancestry is mostly European but "strongly support[ed] the existence of an unadmixed (sic)Native American ancestor [north or south American native]", likely "in the range of 6 to 10 generations ago"), and in February 2019, Warren apologised for having identified as Native American saying that she used the identification as "native in the Senate" .... yeah, right.

Former Judge Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond

While in Canada, Former Judge Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, she said her father was Cree. She was also the highest decorated indigenous scholar in Canadian history, but she has returned her Order of Canada award (the country's highest civilian honour), following allegations about her claims to indigenous ancestry being false. She had previously claimed that her father had been informally adopted by an English descent couple but that he "was Cree, spoke Cree and lived the values of a Cree person". Documentary evidence suggests this to be false (as a judge, her own arguments wouldn't stand in court). The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association later stripped her of an award, because its board members believed she falsified her claims of Indigenous identity.

Sacheen Littlefeather aka Maria Louise Cruz

Sacheen Littlefeather, the 'actress and activist' best-known for accepting a 1973 Academy Award in place of The Godfather's Marlon Brando, and advocating for indigenous rights in place of an acceptance speech, was revealed as a fraud by her family after her death. Her real name was Maria Louise Cruz and she was accused by family members and journalists as being a 'pretendian'.

In fact such is the extent of this problem of false identification as indigenous natives in Canada, that major employers including Universities, who took this self identification on trust, are now amending their hiring practices to require evidence of this. 

It appears that there was easier access to some jobs and student scholarships if someone was native indigenous, so many (possibly thousands of) Canadians claimed an indigenous identity in order to gain access to scholarships, jobs, money, awards, and a certain cachet or prestige, with no background checks or evidence requirements.

That doesn't always explain this phenomena (especially amongst white women), but I guess its a mixture of mental processes, and material advantages in most cases.