If America were a “white supremacist” nation whose entire cultural and social infrastructure is riddled with “systemic racism”, you would think there would be more cases of black people pretending to be white and zero cases of white people insisting that they’re black.

This isn’t another Rachel Dolezal case. It’s a white guy doing the one drop thing to argue that he’s back. That’s probably racist, but not white supremacist.

When Ralph Taylor was born in Sacramento in 1963, his birth certificate indicated that he and his parents were Caucasian. But, like many white Americans, he grew up hearing vague family lore about long-distant Native American ancestry.

“I’ve always known that I’m multiracial,” Taylor, 55, told The Washington Post.

In 2010, Taylor took an AncestryByDNA test, he said, “just to confirm what we’d already known.” The results said that he was 90 percent European and 6 percent indigenous American, as well as 4 percent sub-Saharan African.

Still, the results were enough for Taylor to update his birth certificate last November: It now says that he is black, Native American and Caucasian.

Taylor acknowledges that he looks white. But despite being “visually Caucasian,” as he puts it, he considers himself to be multiracial.

“I’m a certified black man,” he told The Post. “I’m certified black in all 50 states. But the federal government doesn’t recognize me.”

After he was rejected from a program for minority business owners that would have given him an advantage when competing for lucrative government contracts, Taylor sued. His case, which raises complicated questions about how race is defined, is pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

The easy solution is to dismantle the systemic racism of a system that privileges people based on their race. A system that is wildly illegal and unconstitutional, and whose existence should have been terminated by civil rights legislation, which instead institutionalized it. 

And so we’ve got Ralph Taylor insisting that he ought to get access to affirmative action because he’s 4% black.

What’s the counterargument? Besides common sense. Lawsuits like these are going to force federal and state agencies to either…

1. Define the blood quantum percentage that an individual needs to qualify for a racial quota

2. Allow anyone who identifies as a minority access

3. Insist on ignoring such lawsuits and hope that no court, including the Supreme Court, actually rules that someone like Ralph should get his share of racial privilege.

The first strategy would be an ugly admission that we have a system of racial privilege defined by blood.  An apartheid state,if you will. The second strategy would be the most legally viable, and structurally insane strategy, because it also discards the economic and social aspect to let anyone who wants in on the party. The latter strategy is the one lefties would be most tempted to embrace, but would gamble that the Supreme Court would let them run their own apartheid state without even the pretext of any kind of legal structure. That might fly in California, but probably not America.

Or, we could actually try that “equal under the law” thing, instead of going on about equity.