"The Democratic field has a top tier of four white candidates, three of them men," the New York Times reports on its front page today atop a long news article. The "four white candidates" the Times has in mind are Biden, Sanders, Warren, and Buttigieg.
Lower down in the article the Times acknowledges that "Ms. Warren, of course, would be barrier-breaking in her own right as the first woman to be president, as would Mr. Buttigieg, an openly gay man." But nowhere in the article is any acknowledgement of the Native American identity that Warren claims and claimed when she was applying for law professor jobs. It's hard to know what to make of the omission. Does the Times just think that the claim is so thoroughly bogus that it isn't worth mentioning, even in an aside? Does it think Native American women don't count as people of color? Does it have some percentage-of-ancestry threshold for a Native American to be described as such? Does it not want to reinforce the "Pocahantas" tweets of President Trump? The Times article would have been improved by the addition of an acknowledgment of this history.