When the Rachel Dolezal story popped up in June of 2015 (if you’re fortunate enough to have forgotten this one, she was a “black” activist who turned out, embarrassingly, not to be black at all), I wrote a little post about real versus fictional privilege. An excerpt:

Once upon a time, people of mixed race did everything they could to “pass’ as white. No longer. The mulatto Barack Obama ostentatiously identifies himself as black, while pallid Elizabeth Warren listed herself in the legal and academic community as a “Native American’. Another sign of this inversion of privilege is that membership in groups considering themselves ”˜oppressed’ is as tightly restricted as an exclusive country-club, and for the same reasons. No sooner had the news about Ms. Dolezal came out than she was denounced as a scurrilous pretender to victimhood. But people only defend what has value. In a right-side-up world, no sane person would ever bother fighting to keep others from seeking low status ”” but they will do whatever it takes to wall off their privileges against unqualified pretenders.

To sum all this up, I offered Pollack’s Principle of Privilege:

To learn where true privilege lies, simply see how people choose to identify themselves.

Now we learn that the Obama administration has proposed giving a newly favored (and rapidly increasing) demographic bloc with a handy way to avoid the increasingly repugnant stain of Whiteness: a new racial category — called MENA — just for people of Middle Eastern and North African extraction.

Steve Sailer comments here.