Democrats’ journey on race mirrors Elizabeth Warren’s
When Liz Herring arrived at George Washington University as a freshman in 1966, she entered a capital city in the throes of the civil rights movement. Just three years after a quarter-million people had crowded the National Mall to hear the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Congress was debating civil rights legislation as violent protests continued across the country.
Yet, little of that political unrest reached Kappa Alpha Theta, the all-white sorority the future senator from Massachusetts would soon pledge. No Black woman had ever been offered acceptance into any of the sororities on campus.
More than half a century later, the young college coed, who now goes by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, led the charge in Congress to require the Pentagon to rename bases that honor Confederate military leaders. She spent much of her time on the campaign trail during the Democratic primary campaign talking about the racial wealth gap and systemic discrimination, and proposing plans on housing, maternal mortality, child care and other issues, which had an explicit focus on racial justice.
She has emerged, according to activists and organizers, as one of the most racially progressive white politicians in the country.
She’s also the only white woman still under serious consideration to become Joe Biden’s running mate, at a time when some Democratic leaders are pushing for more racial representation on their ticket.
“She did the work and continues to do the work,” said Angela Peoples, director of Black Womxn For, who recently co-wrote an op-ed urging Biden to select Warren as his running mate over several Black women. “That’s the model that I would love to see other Democrats follow.”
In many ways, Warren’s evolution on issues of race is a preview of the journey many white liberals are on now. In the last decade, Democrats have been moving steadily to the left on racial equality and criminal justice. That shift became a leap after the death of George Floyd in police custody in May, with majorities of Democratic voters now expressing support for the Black Lives Matter movement.
Allies say Warren’s awakening traces the arc of much of her life, with the beginnings of a worldview coalescing when she was a student at Rutgers Law School in Newark, N.J., where racial unrest several years earlier had turned the institution into a hub of civil rights activism. As a law professor, her work on bankruptcy illuminated the systemic barriers Black Americans face and helped convince Warren race was intimately intertwined with inequality.
A young Rutgers law student had made his case to other members of the law review: Shouldn’t the all-white organization include some students of color?
“It certainly hit me at that meeting that there wasn’t one person of color on the law review,” recalled Louis Raveson, the student who had broached the subject. “I thought and said to my colleagues, ‘This is not OK.’ ”
Raveson proposed reserving some spots for nonwhite members. “I recall very clearly there was only one person who supported that,” he said. “And that was Liz.”
By the time Warren began her legal studies at Rutgers Law School in the fall of 1973, she was married, a former teacher and a mother.
“Discussions about race were everywhere at Newark and at Rutgers at that time,” said Raveson, who is now a professor at the law school. “I have to think that being at Rutgers and being in Newark must have had a profound effect on Liz.”
As a law professor at the University of Houston, she began delving deeper into her academic research on consumer bankruptcy, colleagues said.
Dissatisfied with the conventional narrative — that people who went bankrupt were victims of their own poor economic choices — she set out to determine why people went bankrupt by analyzing data and visiting courthouses to uncover the individual stories behind the filings. What she found surprised her: Many families who were going bankrupt were middle class.
And she and two colleagues at the University of Texas, Jay Westbrook and Teresa Sullivan, made another discovery through their research that would come to shape her views on systemic inequality. “We found some real evidence that there were disparate impacts on people by ZIP code that implicated race,” Westbrook said.
Stephen Burbank, a colleague of Warren at the University of Pennsylvania law school who was involved in her hiring there in 1987, saw the effect of that work.
“I believe that finding out what was happening to people, including minorities, was very, very influential in the development of all sorts of her views and policy positions,” he said.