Locked in Language

How can we expect our children to grow up free from prejudice when our spoken language reflects a prejudice we often don’t feel? (“A Child’s Palette of Pre-Prejudice,” by John Dreyfuss, Nov. 6). How about the difference between black and white? Day and night? A black sheep?

Many, many years ago, when my then-4-year-old asked a black woman we knew why her skin was black, her wonderful response was, “Because God painted it that way.”

MARJORIE L. SCHWARTZ

Los Angeles