Kwasi Enin, the son of immigrant nurses from Ghana, figured that he would hedge his bets and apply to all of the Ivy League schools. “By applying to all eight, I figured it would better the chances of getting into one,” the 17-year-old senior at William Floyd High School in Mastic, N.Y., said.

According to the Daily News, the collective acceptance rate of all Ivy League schools is less than 9 percent of all applicants for the class of 2018, ranging from 5.9 percent at Harvard to 14 percent at Cornell. [SOURCE]

Then someone pointed out to me that I needed to make a distinction, because Kwasi isn’t “American black,” he’s an African immigrant. Apparently there’s a difference. Honestly, as I see with my own eyes immigrants that look as black as I do come to this country and become a success I often have to ask, “What’s our excuse?” After all, these people have just as much melanin, just as much kink, and they’re making major strides while we’re still last in education, wealth, and jobs. The answer is, YES we “look” the same, but we really aren’t. One culture has bought the poison that America is just too racist for black people to succeed, so why bother? We’re also the culture that feeds and thrives upon enforcing outmoded rules of white supremacy amongst ourselves, and we’re also the culture that thinks it’s perfectly okay to have a near 80 percent out-of-wedlock rate. While the other, African/Caribbean immigrant culture comes with the hard-scrabble determination to succeed, where family sets high expectations for the children and meet them, and whose families are comprised of two parents, poor or not.

Some even try to blame white folks for the disparity of professional and educational success of Africans vs. African Americans, claiming that it’s some vast conspiracy to divide and conquer. Or maybe it’s moon spots. Or global warming. I forget which excuse it is this week.

But what people don’t really grasp is that it’s not so much about culture, but more about values. Another young black man, African American, broke news this week because he received a 5.0 GPA and a 2100 SAT score. So what do both these boys have in common? Strong family structure, two-parent functioning family who expected excellence and got it.

It is time for us to do some serious introspection as a people if we ever want to succeed. Blaming others for our lot makes us look weak and incapable of forming effective strategies to succeed despite obstacles, like many other cultures have had to do. Like the Native Americans, we have allowed ourselves to not only be physically defeated, but worse–mentally defeated. At some point the excuses will have to cease and the poverty pimps must be silenced, or we will continue to see those that look just like us move to the head of the line while we still await our ticket.

One commenter on an article on this subject I was researching said it plain:

We do need to recognize that our dysfunctional urban black culture severely hampers the life prospects of young blacks. This is self-evident. Of course, there are historical and political reasons for this cultural rot, but when blacks from Africa and the Caribbean — not exactly thriving societies — recognize this dysfunction, it’s time we all did. The remarkable success of black immigrants indicates that American blacks are held back not by ongoing racism but by the consequences of past racism, the pathology of today’s hip-hop/gang culture, and the utter failure of Democrat politicians, i.e., welfare dependency, lawlessness, abysmal union-run schools, and rampant corruption.

And on a political note, I wish more blacks would join me in WITHDRAWING support from poverty pimps and poverty politicians who feed on black helplessness like vampires. They are INVESTED in our failure as a people.