This story about how Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic Senate candidate in Massachusetts, handled her supposed Native American identity isn't going away. The Boston Globe has another long article about it today:
...for at least six straight years during Warren's tenure, Harvard University reported in federally mandated diversity statistics that it had a Native American woman in its senior ranks at the law school. According to both Harvard officials and federal guidelines, those statistics are almost always based on the way employees describe themselves.
In addition, both Harvard's guidelines and federal regulations for the statistics lay out a specific definition of Native American that Warren does not meet.
The documents suggest for the first time that either Warren or a Harvard administrator classified her repeatedly as Native American in papers prepared for the government in a way that apparently did not adhere to federal diversity guidelines. They raise further questions about Warren's statements that she was unaware Harvard was promoting her as Native American.
The Globe story doesn't go so far as to question the existence of the " federal diversity guidelines" or "federally mandated diversity statistics," but this whole situation is a wonderful example of how in some cases rather than increasing diversity or improving race relations, their effect is to encourage gaming the system and to fan racial resentments.
