Harvard University apparently described Elizabeth Warren as the institution's "first woman of color" in a 1996 article about affirmative action.
Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Elizabeth Warren faces reporters during a campaign stop at a diner in Shrewsbury, Mass., Sunday, April 29, 2012. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)With the controversy surrounding Democratic U.S. Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren's contested Native American ancestry still fresh, an online political news website has unearthed a 1997 article where Harvard University apparently described her as the institution's "first woman of color."
Politico reports that in a 1997 Fordham Law Review story by Laura Padilla called “Intersectionality and positionality: Situating women of color in the affirmative action dialogue,” a news director at Harvard Law School said Warren was the first woman professor at the university to hold such a distinction.
"There are few women of color who hold important positions in the academy, Fortune 500 companies, or other prominent fields or industries," Politico quotes the original story as saying. "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."
U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., who has been under fire for refusing to return $50,000 in campaign cash from J.P. Morgan employees following the company's loss of $2 billion following an admitted risky investment, took aim at the law professor via his campaign manager Jim Barnett.
"This new revelation that Harvard characterized Elizabeth Warren as a 'woman of color' in the context of affirmative action is a clear indication that something is deeply wrong. As we all now know, Professor Warren is not a minority, her ridiculous claims notwithstanding," Barnett said in a statement following the report by Politico. "She is certainly not a 'woman of color.' This disturbing development illustrates why it is critically important that Warren, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania stop stonewalling, release her personnel records and come clean about why Warren is continuously represented as a minority hire at these schools."
Warren's contested Native American ancestry has been questioned for weeks as Brown's campaign and others have questioned whether she used family stories of such heritage to further her career through affirmative action programs. Although Warren has repeatedly denied such claims, and the universities that previously hired her released statements saying they weren't aware of such heritage claims or that they played no part in her hiring, the specter of such allegations has lingered.
Although the Boston Globe initially reported that the New England Historic Genealogical Society had unearthed a marriage license listing Warren's great-great-great grandmother as Cherokee, which would make the consumer advocate 1/32 Cherokee, it quietly retracted the claim in a correction, which can be read below:
"Because of a reporting error, a story in the May 1 Metro section and the accompanying headline incorrectly described the 1894 document that was purported to list Elizabeth Warren’s great-great-great grandmother as a Cherokee. The document, alluded to in a family newsletter found by the New England Historic Genealogical Society, was an application for a marriage license, not the license itself. Neither the society nor the Globe has seen the primary document, whose existence has not been proven."
When asked by Politico to respond to the story showing that Harvard described Warren as a minority professor in 1996, Warren's Press Secretary Alethea Harney said that the report included nothing new and it was time to refocus the campaign dialogue of other issues.
"Elizabeth has been clear that she is proud of her Native American heritage and everyone who hired Elizabeth has been clear that she was hired because she was a great teacher, not because of that heritage," Harney told Politico. "It's time to return to issues - like rising student loan debt, job creation, and Wall Street regulation - that will have a real impact on middle class families."
For more than a decade, Warren said she listed herself as Native American in a directory of law school professors in order to meet people like her. She said she stopped "checking the box" when it never happened, admitting it wasn't the intention of the directory.