Politico Busts Elizabeth Warren–Almost

Maggie Haberman of Politico reports an interesting find: a 1997 article in the Fordham Law Review that listed Democrat hopeful Elizabeth Warren, now challenging incumbent Scott Brown for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, as Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color,” based on an interview with a Harvard official at the time:

“There are few women of color who hold important positions in the academy, Fortune 500 companies, or other prominent fields or industries,” the piece says. “This is not inconsequential. Diversifying these arenas, in part by adding qualified women of color to their ranks, remains important for many reaons. For one, there are scant women of color as role models. In my three years at Stanford Law School, there were no professors who were women of color. Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995.”

Haberman reports Warren’s claim that her alleged Native American heritage “never came up” during her time at Harvard. However, Breitbart News has established that Harvard did cite it in at least one report on faculty diversity, in 1999. It is likely that the information about Warren’s Native American heritage had been offered voluntarily by Warren herself. 

Regardless, Haberman’s discovery is another piece in the puzzle of how, whether, and why Warren may have listed herself as Native American–and whether Harvard Law School sought to promote her heritage for its own purposes. It is also a sign that the mainstream media may be realizing it can no longer ignore this controversy, or allow Warren to evade it.