Mark Andrew Dwyer

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Originally published in the October 19, 2003 issue of the Alamance Independent

COCONUTS

The very name "coconut", some minorities use to describe a person who is black or brown on the outside but white on the inside, is very indicative of the root cause of their relative lack of success in America. If you hold against someone that he/she "acts white" then you really cannot expect to go very far in this meritocratical society that tends to reward success and punish failure. And blaming whites for about everything that went wrong with lives of minorities is but a handy excuse that conveniently absolves the less diligent and the less talented but more procreative from responsibility for all the bad choices, acting anti-white being one of them, they managed to make in their lifetimes.

Once I had a friend in school. He was as white as I was, a nice and entertaining fellow, first to play and last to study. As one can guess, he kept getting F's despite his father spanking him every time he brought home a failing grade. He complained to me several times, how unfair it was to him. He never saw his attitude as the reason of his poor school performance, and blamed everything, from poor textbooks that bored him to vengeful teachers that conspired against him, for his being the worst student in class. When asked how come he was the only one who were experiencing this kind of problems he claimed that other kids' parents did their homework for them and bribed the teachers so that they got good grades on their trimester reports.

When asked why Indians and Chinese immigrants prosper so much better in America than blacks and Hispanics, the social engineers of affirmative action and multiculturalism have always one thing to blame: white racism, this time a selective one. In their theory of world, whites somehow are less discriminatory against yellow and brown (Indian, that is) people, although they are so prejudiced against black and bronze (Hispanic) ones. Some even suggest a plot that supposedly involves whites and other pale skinned people against the rest of the world's population. Yeah, right, Europeans and Asian immigrants conspire together against nonwhites, err, against Africans and South Americans. And this simple fact that Hispanic kids are over-represented on playgrounds but they are under-represented in libraries while Chinese kids consistently excel in schools gets overlooked in the process. Oh well, probably their Chinese parents do their homework for them and bribe the teachers.

I see a pattern in rhetoric offered by many minority leaders who refuse to acknowledge that not racism but a lack of merit is the foremost reason for their constituencies to fail or to lag behind. When I learn about black teen single mothers on welfare that expect the society to take care of their neglected children and to make sure that these kids, many of them deprived of parental positive role models and attracted to crime, alcohol, and drugs, will be given their share in American dream. This kind of irresponsible, if not reckless, breeding is a crime against the newborn. If one can get jailed for spanking a child, why giving birth to a human being without respect to circumstances that often condemn the innocent newborn baby to poverty and neglect goes unpunished? Is this because having only as many children as one can comfortably support and rear would be "acting white"?

It's time for minority leaders to stop perpetuating the victimhood myth and the sense of entitlement to abundance and carelessness among those that they claim to represent. It's time for them to stop encouraging blacks and Hispanics to ethnic and cultural separatism. If Indian and Chinese immigrants can assimilate and prosper in this country, and they do, then everyone else can. It's time for the minority leaders to begin preaching this simple truth that America gives everyone a chance, and those who waste it are doomed to fail.