The award with which this post is titled has got to go to intra-racial race-baiting. Like crabs in a basket, when groups of people of the same skin color (or nation of ancestry, or “race” ) bait each other as self-loathing. I’m gonna let my brass balls hang with this opinion, so if you hate me for my tactlessness, I have no reason to apologize anyway.

Black Person A is hell-bent on success, working hard, and getting out of the situation in which he was born (let’s assume he was born not dirt-poor but poor enough to be struggling for upward mobility, shall we?). He goes to school every day, and he wants to be *gasp!* a chemical engineer. Black Person B, the crabbiest crab in the basket, would accuse him, quite predictably, of “trying to be white.”

Filipinos get this too. Note this snippet of a comment of Abel’s on this post of Miss Malkin’s (scroll down to get the comment), where he calls her a “legal immigrant and american wannabe.” When Filipinos oppose anti-American views in political discourse, the most predictable ad hominem we get is that we are trying to be “more American than most Americans.” This is usually followed with a statement of condescension whose gist is: “oh, we understand why you’re trying to be more American than most Americans, you want to be accepted.”

It used to irritate me when I would be accused of being a traitor to my race and nationality, being called a coconut, and what not. Now, it bores me. If the Philippines is mainly full of these crabs in a basket, it deserves what it will get down the line: stagnation if not regression, unless those Filipinos who actually succeed get as bored of them as I do, and actually move elsewhere to greener pastures. Maybe if they have enough free time, they’ll then just write about them like cultural artefacts and move along.