(Becket Adams) Massachusetts senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren’s “fauxcahontas” problem (the controversy over her 1/32 Native American heritage) isn’t going away anytime soon. Her campaign has been in desperate damage control mode for two weeks and it doesn’t look like things are going to get any easier.
Here’s the latest issue her campaign is going to have to deal with: A 1997 Fordham Law Review piece that refers to Warren as Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color.”
“The mention was in the middle of a lengthy and heavily-annotated Fordham piece on diversity and affirmative action and women,” Maggie Haberman of POLITICO reports. “The title of the piece, by Laura Padilla, was ‘Intersectionality and positionality: Situating women of color in the affirmative action dialogue.’”
The passage reads [emphasis added]:
There are few women of color who hold important positions in the academy, Fortune 500 companies, or other prominent fields or industries.
This is not inconsequential. Diversifying these arenas, in part by adding qualified women of color to their ranks, remains important for many reasons. 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.
