I grow weary of the continuing cry that minorities are not given an opportunity to get ahead. Of course they aren't given such a chance. Why should they be? They have to earn the chance, not be given it. As a youth, my family was quite poor and yet I managed, without benefit of free scholarships, to earn a couple degrees, get a decent job, and am now able to help my children through college. No one gave it to me. I had to work for it. General Powell seemed to do pretty good; I firmly believe he could have been elected President had he chosen to run. We have many minorities serving in high positions in government and in the private sector. I think each of these citizens would feel insulted to have it said of them that they do not deserve what they have earned and that they are what they are solely because it was given to them.
Now, to say that I 'owe' a debt to someone else just because their ancestors had it rough, seems rather ridiculous to me. I am not responsible for the past. I only have responsibility for my own actions and I refuse to accept someone else's debt. If such a concept was valid, then to whom should I apply to make up for the fact that my ancestral family came from stock that was not born to the nobility? No, like anyone else, I would be happy to accept gifts directed towards me, but I certainly don't feel that anything is owed me.
As a child I was taught that two wrongs do not make a right. Now we are taught that to correct past instances of discrimination we must practice still more discrimination. No, I think we should simply enforce the existing laws against discrimination, prosecuting those who violate those laws AND prosecuting those of whom it can be proven have made deliberate false claims of having been discriminated against.
Another problem which I see is that even though there is compelling evidence of greater numbers of minority persons in increasingly prestigious positions and even though we see more mixed marriages and relationships than ever before, yet the cry of racism seems to become only more strident and more frequent. No longer is someone turned down for a job because they are unqualified; no, it is always because they are a minority. (If this is true and these folks are, in fact, qualified for the job, then apparently these same minorities can no longer complain about not getting proper education, training, and experience because they are tacitly, if not overtly, stating that they are qualified and they could only have gotten so qualified by being allowed to take advantage of the opportunity to so do.) This constant voicing of being discriminated against serves only to cause the valid complaints to be lost in the maelstrom of noise. Additionally, those who would hearken to the cries of the truly injured can not hear their cries above the noise of the false complainants. And even if they could hear them, there is developing a tendency to regard it as only one more case of the little boy crying "wolf!" too often.
One further note: Why is it that if a black person does succeed in achieving a prominent position in society, he/she is then referred to by the black community as having become an Uncle Tom? My theory is that to say otherwise would be to admit that a black person is capable of achieving success and that would then show the falsity of the arguments of those who would insist that it is impossible for a "true" black person to rise into the upper ranks of our society.