‘Racism Is on the Rebound’

I can really relate to Haywood’s piece on racism.

I fairly recently made a mistake like his mistake of suggesting to his fellow jurors that a young black man’s troubles with the Beverly Hills police might have been due to the color of his skin.

My mistake was in suggesting to my colleagues at a principals’ meeting that, perhaps, we shouldn’t rely heavily on police in solving some of the problems we face in our schools. My reasoning was that in my opinion--based on my personal experiences as a black person--police officers don’t always handle situations in a positive manner, especially problems involving minorities.

Why, you would have thought I had splashed water from the Arctic Ocean on my fellow educators. They were breathless. A couple of them looked at me as though I part of the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.”

Like Gar, I don’t bear any malice toward my skeptics. But if educators who must enlighten our future generations, and jurors, who must see to it that justice is served, can’t acknowledge racism in all its forms, how are we, as a society, ever to restart the wheels of progress toward some semblance of racial equality?

ERNIE McCRAY

San Diego