There is a current furor over Elizabeth Warren, Democratic Senate candidate in Massachusetts. On the faculty of Harvard Law School she claimed to be a Native American and apparently a careful read of her genealogy suggests she truly is 1/32 Indian.
She neither looks nor acts Native American, but a distant ancestor, a great, great, great grandmother was Cherokee. See an article about this in The New Republic or another in National Review Online.
This kind of hire is so common. Pressured to meet affirmative action goals (aka quotas), and not particularly wanting someone who actually is a full-fledged cranky minority, schools and firms hire the Elizabeth Warrens of this world. That is, people who can claim to be minorities but actually are no such thing.
At my university, another department had a woman hired to meet the Hispanic quota. She was literally Hispanic, that is, her parents were immigrants from Spain. Born and raised in the U.S., she was as much of European stock as any other "white" person on the faculty. A perfect affirmative action hire, she had no interest in La Raza and the like.
