Going Native

By JAMES TARANTO

To judge by photographs, Elizabeth Warren, the leftist Democratic professor running for Scott Brown’s Senate seat, is as white as a polar bear’s ghost after a dental bleaching in a snowstorm. But the Boston Herald reported last week that Warren “was once touted by embattled Harvard Law School officials . . . as proof of their faculty’s diversity.”

“Although the conventional wisdom among students and faculty is that the Law School faculty includes no minority women,” the Harvard Crimson reported in 1996, “[law school spokesman Mike] Chmura said professor of law Elizabeth Warren is Native American.”

Associated Press

Harvard’s face of “diversity.”

Apparently “family lore” has it that “both Warren’s grandparents on her mother’s side had Native American lineage.” That lore may or may not be accurate. Genealogist Christopher Child “traced back Warren’s family to her great-grandfather on her mother’s side and couldn’t find any proof of Native American heritage.” He tells the Herald that “in her immediate pedigree there is no one who is listing themselves as not white,” although he also says, in the reporter’s paraphrase, “that finding Native American lineage is not always easy.”

According to the earlier Herald story, “the Warren campaign said the candidate never authorized Harvard Law to claim her as a minority hire.” She “has no recollection of discussing her Native American heritage with Harvard Law School faculty” before her hiring. Charles Fried, another Harvard law prof (and worshipful supporter of Barack Obama), also “said he didn’t recall her Native American heritage ever coming up during the hiring process.”

Today’s Herald reports that the Brown campaign “last night called for Warren to ‘come clean.’ ” In itself her ethnic background, or the family’s confusion about it, is no scandal. But a Brown

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