My whole life, I’ve tried to be for Michelle and my girls what my father wasn’t for my mother and me. I want to break that cycle — where a father’s not at home, where a father’s not helping to raise that son and daughter. I want to be a better father, a better husband, a better man. . . .

Growing up, I made quite a few [bad choices] myself. Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. I had a tendency to make excuses for me not doing the right thing.

We’ve got no time for excuses.

In today’s hyper-connected, hyper-competitive world, with millions of young people from China and India and Brazil, many of whom started with a whole lot less than all of you did, all of them entering the global workforce alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything you haven’t earned. Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination.

Moreover, you have to remember that whatever you’ve gone through, it pales in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured — and if they overcame them, you can overcome them, too.

Morehouse College is a historically black, all-male college in Atlanta.

Related articles

• Obama gets personal about race and manhood in Morehouse speech (washingtonpost.com)

Look at this — before Jackie Robinson, they didn’t let black guys play major league baseball!

Right . . . that was 70 years ago, in the 1940s. Let’s move on already.

You know what else they did in the 1940s? They rounded up Japanese Americans, just took them right out of their homes and their jobs, and stuck them into “relocation camps.”

When’s the last time you heard a Japanese person talk about relocation camps? They don’t talk about relocation camps because they’re too busy being engineers and doctors and businessmen and raising their families and sending their kids to top universities.

You can focus your mind on what other people did a long time ago or you can focus your mind on what you’re doing right now.

Let’s move on already.

Rating:

Footnote: We’ve come full circle on blacks in baseball. The defending World Series champion San Francisco Giants don’t have a single black player on their current roster (although some of the Latin players are pretty dark). Black men can play baseball if they want to but they don’t want to.

Jon Provost and Lassie

A new study from the American Council on Education shows that the percentages of black, Asian and Hispanic provosts have declined over the past five years.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this story under the headline “Falling Diversity of Provosts Signals Challenge for Presidential Pipeline, Study Finds.”

FALLING DIVERSITY! LOOK OUT BELOW!

Ha ha . . . but seriously, who even knows what a provost is? I don’t. I’ve vaguely heard of it as an academic job title but that’s about it.

I know that Jon Provost played little Timmy on the Lassie TV series. I know that Marie Prevost was a one-time Mack Sennett bathing beauty and leading lady in the 1920s whose screen glory had faded by the time she died of acute alcoholism in a small Hollywood apartment at the age of 38.

By the way, I notice that Asian students are continuing to excel, even in the absence of Asian provosts. Go figure.

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.

— Thomas Sowell

My fellow Americans –

The first headline I saw this morning was Obama Victory Speech Urges Unity in Facing Challenges.

In case you haven’t seen it, here’s an ad run by President Obama in Ohio in the closing days of the campaign:

A few days ago, it was Us vs. Them, whoever you imagine Us and Them to be. Now it’s Obama Urges Unity.

“Not one of us” is an ugly sentiment in itself, but coming from a man who not long ago promised us Hope and Change and Inclusiveness, it betrays a complete absence of character.

Four years ago, I said what I thought I needed to say to get elected, and I’m doing the same thing now, even though what I’m saying now is the exact opposite of what I said then.

Obama has been nothing if not divisive. On class and income, he speaks contemptuously of “millionaires” and glowingly of “spreading the wealth around.”

Obamacare, his signature “accomplishment,” allows — encourages, in fact — free riders to take advantage of others who’ll be forced to pay double and triple fares.

On race, he gratuitously inserts himself into cases involving black victims — Henry Louis Gates, Trayvon Martin, who “would look like my son if I had one.”

In cases where black boys beat a white man almost to death because they were bored, or black boys killed a white girl for bike parts, he has nothing to say — nothing about hate crimes, social disintegration or the resemblance of the perpetrators to his own hypothetical offspring.

Now that the election is over and won, he takes a few minutes for the obligatory call for unity before another four years of division.

I, for one, am tired of the bullshit.

Randy Newman has a new song and video out — “I’m Dreaming” — about a voter who casts his ballot solely based on skin color.

I listened to it . . . it’s great, like every other Newman song I can think of, but didn’t this train leave the station in 2008? We already have a black president. (Yes, his mother was white, but “mixed-race” doesn’t get you 12 percent of the electorate.)

Will some people not vote for Obama because he’s black? Yes.

Will some people only vote for Obama because he’s black? Yes.

As Geraldine Ferraro said in 2008, “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman of any color, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is.”

Naturally, she was denounced as a racist by the Obama campaign.

Let’s move on already . . .

In a story ignored by the national media, in April a Tunica County, Miss., jury convicted NAACP official Lessadolla Sowers on 10 counts of fraudulently casting absentee ballots.

Sowers received a five-year prison term for each of the 10 counts, but Circuit Court Judge Charles Webster permitted Sowers to serve those terms concurrently, according to the Tunica Times, the only media outlet to cover the sentencing.

Sowers was found guilty of voting in the names of Carrie Collins, Walter Howard, Sheena Shelton, Alberta Pickett, Draper Cotton and Eddie Davis. She was also convicted of voting in the names of four dead persons: James L. Young, Dora Price, Dorothy Harris, and David Ross.

— Mississippi NAACP leader sent to prison for 10 counts of voter fraud | The Daily Caller

Cops: Teens beat man because ‘they were just bored’ — NBCNews.com

Strange piece of “journalism” from NBC News . . . basically just a rewrite of a story in the Cincinnati Enquirer in which a 45-year-old man named Pat Mahaney received a senseless, brutal beating from six boys, ages 13 and 14:

Mahaney was taken to Mercy Mount Airy Hospital, where he was treated for four days before being released Tuesday. Police said doctors had to insert a tube down his throat to remove all of the blood from his stomach.

A tube remained in his right nostril as blood continued to seep out of his head, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported, and his left eye is heavily blackened.

Police said the teens admitted that Mahaney had done nothing to provoke being kicked and punched repeatedly in the face while he lay helpless on the ground. One of the boys allegedly told police they only stopped assaulting Mahaney when a neighbor began yelling at them and said he was calling police.

The strange thing about the NBC article, though, is that it deletes information about the race of the kids, which is in the Enquirer article:

“It was a heinous crime but it was not a hate crime,” said North College Hill Police Chief Gary Foust of the teens, who are all black.

He said several residents have called police inquiring if Mahaney was specifically targeted because he is white. He was not, the chief stressed.

Two questions:

1. If the boys were white and the victim black, would NBC have deleted that information?
2. Do the boys look like President Obama’s son would look if he had one?

While more than nine in 10 Americans would vote for a presidential candidate who is black, a woman, Catholic, Hispanic, or Jewish, significantly smaller percentages would vote for one who is an atheist (54%) or Muslim (58%). Americans’ willingness to vote for a Mormon (80%) or gay or lesbian (68%) candidate falls between these two extremes.

— Atheists, Muslims See Most Bias as Presidential Candidates

I fear that I won’t live to see a gay atheist in the Oval Office.

In other findings, far more Americans are open to voting for a black presidential candidate (96%) than for a Mormon (80%). Blacks also poll higher than women (95%), Catholics (94%) and Jews (91%), although those percentages are within the margin of sampling error.

Things You Can Do

Discriminate against Asians in college admissions.

Things You Can’t Do

Use “Chink in the Armor” as the headline for an article on the New York Knicks.

The University of California is prohibited by law from considering race in the admissions process, but they are allowed to identify certain ethnic groups as “underrepresented minorities.”

Here are some freshman enrollment numbers at UC Berkeley for Fall 2011. The first four groups on the list are considered underrepresented; the others aren’t.

Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best.

Chinese parents can say, “You’re lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you.” By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they’re not disappointed about how their kids turned out.

— Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

Asian kids are putting a different race on their college applications to boost their chances of getting into the top schools.

Lanya Olmstead was born in Florida to a mother who immigrated from Taiwan and an American father of Norwegian ancestry. Ethnically, she considers herself half Taiwanese and half Norwegian. But when applying to Harvard, Olmstead checked only one box for her race: white.

— Some Asians’ college strategy: Don’t check ‘Asian’ – Yahoo! News

That’s a rather modest strategy. Identifying yourself as white does give you a little bit of a boost but to really improve the odds, I’d advise everyone to go ahead and check the Black or Hispanic box. Or Eskimo. Eskimos are kind of Asian-looking.

Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade examined applicants to top colleges from 1997, when the maximum SAT score was 1600 (today it’s 2400). Espenshade found that Asian-Americans needed a 1550 SAT to have an equal chance of getting into an elite college as white students with a 1410 or black students with an 1100.

Here in California, state colleges and universities are prohibited by Proposition 209 from considering race in the admissions process. As a result, the student body at UC Berkeley is more than 40 percent Asian, up from about 20 percent before Prop 209 was passed in 1996. (The California population is 13 percent Asian.)

Other top schools that don’t consider race in admissions also have a high percentage of Asian students. Cal Tech is about one-third Asian. (As a private school, Cal Tech is not subject to Prop 209, but chooses not to consider race.)

Yale, Harvard, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania declined to make admissions officers available for interviews for this story.

Draw your own conclusions. We are being overrun by the yellow horde!

Image via Wikipedia

The dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering expressed support today for a recommendation from a student group that the college create a recruitment and retention plan for women and underrepresented minority students.

— California Watch

It sounds like the dean might be up for lowering the engineering standards to meet diversity metrics. Bad idea. Engineering is serious business.

Also: Preferential treatment by a public institution based on race, sex or ethnicity is prohibited by California law.

I’ve got a better and more legal idea: How about if the women and “underrepresented” minority students suck it up and meet the same academic standards as everyone else?

Or apply to a different school? If they can’t meet the standards at Berkeley, they might do fine at a less demanding institution like Stanford or UCLA.

I’ve attended engineering school myself. We had diversity admits. After one semester, maybe two, they weren’t there anymore. Who was helped?

Here’s a photo of some of the students who scored 800 on sections or subject tests of the SAT at Wilson High School in Hacienda Heights.

What do they have in common? Does anything jump out at you?

Either Asian kids are just genetically superior with regard to intelligence, or Amy Chua should replace Dr. Spock on the parenting bookshelf . . .

Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a controversial, affirmative action-like bill Saturday that would have allowed public colleges and universities in California to consider demographic factors in admissions processes.

— Brown vetoes affirmative action-like SB 185 – The Daily Californian

Like!

I hate to sound selfish but whatever “demographic factors” they were planning to consider, I’m 110 percent sure they’d serve to penalize my kid, nieces, nephews, grandkids — everyone in my family now and forever — and for what? Racial inequities of the past that they had nothing to do with?

Not interested in taking the hit for that, sorry.

We’re good people. We stopped inviting the slaveholders to the family reunions because they’ve all been dead for about 100 years . . .

Despite massive outcries of protest from campus organizations, the Berkeley College Republicans are adamant in going ahead with their controversial bake sale.

The sale — intended as a satirical response to the affirmative action-like SB 185 currently awaiting Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature — will involve baked goods that are priced by race and sex. Under the pricing structure, white students would have to pay $2.00 for a pastry, for example, while Latinos would pay $1.00 and Native Americans would pay $0.25. Women would receive a blanket 25 cent discount.

— The Daily Californian

I love it! “Massive outcries of protest”! “Controversial bake sale”!

The lack of perspective is staggering. It’s okay to favor kids of one race over another in college admissions, just don’t try it with something truly important like the price of a cupcake . . .

My son and I are driving through the neighborhood . . . an Asian kid about 12 years old rides by on a scooter. He lives across the street from us but I almost didn’t recognize him because he’s got his hair lightened and highlighted.

“Typical Japanese,” my son says.

“Japanese kids like to highlight their hair?”

“Yeah,” he says, like it’s an obvious question.

“That kid is Korean, isn’t he?”

“Same thing.”

In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that “stressing academic success is not good for children” or that “parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun.” By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way. Instead, the vast majority of the Chinese mothers said that they believe their children can be “the best” students, that “academic achievement reflects successful parenting,” and that if children did not excel at school then there was “a problem” and parents “were not doing their job.” Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately 10 times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams.

— Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

The answer is distressingly obvious: Obama’s the biggest affirmative action baby in history. When other pols are trying, failing, learning, while climbing up the middle rungs of the ladder, he got a pass.

— Mickey Kaus