I know that now. I honor him as an American war hero whatever his race.
For me, it is one of the aspects of Affirmative Action that irritate me the most-that someone who has accomplished something that should be independent of race, has race injected into it because of Affirmative Action, and it diminishes that accomplishment by default, because many won’t know if that person actually did something that set them apart, resulting in the promotion to a new job or naming a ship after them.
If people in general didn’t know the details of this intimately, they might assume this was an action made for ideological reasons rather than on true merit.
In this case, it is true merit that this person was lauded for by naming a war vessel after him, but I find it difficult to criticize people who would suspect that it was an “Affirmative Action” result.
And that is an unavoidable byproduct of the racist aspect of “Affirmative Action”. Many people will attribute things to that, even though it is indisputably not that in this case, and many others as well.