Courtland Milloy
Washington Post

Dear Mr. Milloy,

I just wanted to make sure you got one letter from a white person affirming your column on Littleton, since you are certainly going to get a barrage from defensive and offended white folks.

Every word in your column makes sense to me. When I think about my friends who are raising African-American children, especially boys, I am outraged by the media-fed reaction to Littleton.

My friend in Chicago, herself white but with an African-American son, is struggling to get him into a high school where he can simply study and engage in extracurricular activities in peace -- the kind they took for granted in Littleton, and will have again. My friend in Richmond, with her son in college, hopes she has gotten past the worst years with her son safe and on the way to a good education, but fears perhaps as a single mother that she reined him in too much. She never had the leisure to let the kid go unsupervised in the basement, and she would damn well have known if he had one gun, let alone four. And of course I think of the elderly city-dwellers I know who have long since learned the painful ambiguity of both loving and fearing troubled young men in your community.

Littleton was not even a case of chickens coming home to roost. It was more like the brief terrible touching down of a tornado -- a tornado that was only an offshoot of the massive hurricanes that have been unmoving over our inner cities for decades, fed by the marketing of cheap drugs, weapons and media sleaze, and held in place by institutional segregation in housing, jobs and the media.

I do not begrudge the folks in Littleton their row of fifteen crosses, high on a picturesque range. Every death is singular and meaningful. But, precisely because that is true, I am glad you spoke up for the thousands of crosses that stand, mostly invisible but still achingly present, in our city streets.

I am sending this letter to you personally, first, to make sure you get it and get the affirmation you deserve for your courageous column, and second, because I did not feel it was worth the effort to craft a concise, necessarily very limited, letter on this topic to the editor of the Post, when I know it will go unpublished.

I am a fairly decent writer, with some professional writing background. I have sent about eight letters to the Post over the last ten years, and had about four printed, written on topics of international signficance. I just sent in one on the new Cold War, and expect I have the same fifty-fifty chance of publication for that one.

I have also sent in fifteen or more letters on racism as exemplified in the Post, each stating my position as an anti-racist white person. Same writing skills, same quality of letters. Not one has been published, even when, in a few cases, the Post printed parallel letters from African-Americans. The Post clearly considers a person breaching the walls of white solidarity from inside to be a fringe character, whose opinions are too odd to print.

I am unusual. I have no illusions about that. Most white folks are blind to their own complicity in racism, because they don’t even know what racism is -- and media like the Post will certainly never tell them. I know that I am fortunate to have been exposed to, and grasped, the concept that racism is about power and not about simple prejudice, a concept that most white people never even get to hear about. I owe a lot to patient people, mostly African-American, who have taken the time to share their lessons -- and to my parents, who passed on a legacy of open-mindedness.

The white folks who will undoubtedly write to you will condemn you with an offensive arrogance that puts their concerns at the center of the world, and defines African-American concerns as by definition marginal. But they will write from ignorance as well as arrogance. They simply do not know their own history, and they do not know the world they live in. They do not know that their lives -- who they associate with, what they get paid, how they are duped by government and business -- are all incomprehensible without an understanding of how racism works. They do not understand that African American history is the core of their own history, not a boutique specialty. (After all, how many of them have African ancestors and don’t even know it?) They look around the world from a great height and admire how high they have brought themselves and how solid a perch they have achieved, and they avoid even a glance at the precarious machinery that keeps them there.

I’m sure you don’t expect them to understand that you are contributing to an education that they genuinely and desperately need, for their own future sanity and safely. For the day when the chickens do really come home to roost.

Thanks for trying. Please keep it up.

Sincerely,

Larry Yates