Sometimes I get a grin when the news of the day brings something to the front that causes the folks on the front porch to say, "I bet 'ole Sal is laughing at this."
Yes, my friends - it has been a good week for the front porch.
Joel Achenbach at WaPo is positively Salamandersque;
I shouldn’t write about this. I’m way too insane on this topic, too strident and militant and prone to uncharacteristic flights of outrage. Very few things offend me, but someone passing himself or herself off as Native American when he/she is white by any reasonable definition, and doing so in a way that might accrue personal benefits and perhaps even harm, indirectly, the opportunities of those who are genuinely members of an underrepresented racial or ethnic minority, raises the hackles on my dander [copy editor: please revise to comport with Post stylebook].
Elizabeth Warren, candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, listed herself as a minority in a reference book of law professors, according to the Boston Globe (the rival Herald broke the story about all this last Friday, I believe). Harvard, under fire for a lack of diversity on its faculty, counted Warren as a Native American. A genealogist says she’s 1/32nd Cherokee — her great great great grandmother was a Cherokee according to a 1894 record. Warren has said she didn’t use her self-identification as Native American to advance her career in any way and the law schools that hired her have said it was irrelevant.
Of course, as we have documented here over the years - our Navy is thick with racial & ethnic self-identification fraud, delusion, and just plain gamesmanship.
We have a Flag Officer who, because one of his grandparents grew up in south Texas - though he grew up in the MD suburbs - takes all the gain and recognition as a "Hispanic leader."
We have a Flag Officer who tells rooms full of officers that they need to claim any Diversity label they can in order to improve their careers - like he did.
We give special treatment to the daughters of a VADM, and hold the Bosnian refugee to a higher standard than her .... all because of the most vile, base, and useless definition of a human - their race/ethnicity.
We have a system where we classify a person who Basque grandfather was from Irun, Spain as "Hispanic" - yet the other person whose Basque grandfather was just meters away in Hendaye, France as "white."
My kids are much more In'jun than Elizabeth Warren is/may be - what do they do? A child has a grandfather born in Italy as a child but raised in Ecuador? Que?
Does this system make sense to you? Of course not - unless you believe the Navy should actively support a socio-political, Cultural-Marxism based program that exists to simply produce paychecks for the commissariat, provide a stone for axe grinding, and feed petty people with petty grievances they need to define their own shortcomings.
UPDATE: Yes, a very zen filled day. Via Roger Clegg, we have another example of where this mentality that the Navy fully supports leads:
In Detroit, business owners can receive preferred status as a minority owned company.
Morgan has been doing business in Detroit for years. Now, the city is asking him to submit a birth certificate showing who is parents are and what their race is.
"It's very offensive when a minority doing it to a minority," said Morgan.
"Your papers, please."
Didn't we used to point to the Nazi habit of having ethnicity on their identification as one of the many examples of their racism and evil? Well, that is how I was raised.
BTW -
here are the demographics for Detroit:
As of the 2010 Census, ... the city had 82.7% African American (82.1% non- Hispanic black), 10.6% White (7.8% non-Hispanic white), 1.1% Asian, 0.4% Native American, 0.02% Pacific Islander, 3.0% other races, 2.2% two or more races. In addition, 6.8% of the population self-identified as Hispanic or Latino, of any race, mainly made up of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans.
So, we have the majority ethnic group giving preference to their own ethnic group ... or those who either self-identify or have "the papers" to say they are.
How American is that! Feeling very 21st Century, aren't you?
Wait, I got my numbers wrong. That should be 12th Century. My bust.
No guests on this week's show - just open phone and open topic. 
