A while back, I wrote an article about a bizarre story out of Australia.

The first rule of White Aborigine Club is that no one talks about it. Australia has a surplus of white aborigines who hold down university positions teaching aboriginal culture, pick up aboriginal scholarships and receive all sorts of preferential treatment. These white aborigines are not albinos, they are “Ward Churchills” — white men and women who claim to be aborigines because of some ancestor. And to question their authenticity all you need is a pair of working eyes.

According to the court decision all the white aborigines had to do to win was prove that Bolt had “insulted, humiliated and offended” them and that it was done “because of the race, color or ethnic origin of fair-skinned Aboriginal people.” Or in this case the lack thereof. 

The Federal Court had not only ruled that you could not point out that a white man is not a black man, but it had also created an entirely new protected group—white men who claim to be black men.

“The members of the group referred to are fair skinned Aboriginal persons who, by a combination of descent, self-identification and communal recognition are, and are recognized as, Aboriginal persons.”

“Fair-skinned aboriginal person” had become the newest protected class and race was now completely subjective. You could be any race you wanted to be, so long as there was an academic position, a political post or a didgeridoo lesson in it for you.

This was in 2011. When Rachel Dolezal was still in good standing with the NAACP and before men trying to use women’s bathrooms had become the nation’s greatest civil rights cause. And, before Elizabeth Warren’s fake Cherokee shenanigans had become national news.

But America has its own profitable white aborigine setup. Warren is just the most famous member of the club.

The case highlights a major failure in the nation’s efforts to help disadvantaged Americans by steering municipal, state and federal contracts to qualified minority-owned companies. In many instances, government agencies have not vetted those companies to protect the interests of taxpayers and legitimate minority contractors.

Since 2000, the federal government and authorities in 18 states, including California, have awarded more than $300 million under minority contracting programs to companies whose owners made unsubstantiated claims of being Native American, a Los Angeles Times investigation found.

The minority-owned certifications and contract work were issued in every West Coast state, New Mexico and Idaho, Texas and four Southern states, several states in the Midwest and as far east as Pennsylvania, The Times found.

In applying for the minority programs, 12 of the 14 business owners involved claimed membership in one of three self-described Cherokee groups, according to government records and interviews.

Let’s assume that all of this is true.

How do we even recognize what the definition of a minority business is? If we’re going to demand racial certification from people who claim to be Cherokee, why not from people who claim a variety of identities? Can Beto O’Rourke get a minority business owner contract? More seriously, is anyone going to certify minority groups? Or, what stops a man from wearing high heels and applying as a female business owner?

The prospect of that kind of vetting is impossible. 

We could go back to giving contracts to the best people. Either that or a whole bunch of folks who claim to be Cherokee.