Schoolchildren on the Rioting

As a young Jewish teen-age girl, I don’t come face to face with anti-Semitism very often. One cannot identify me as a Jew by just looking at me. Unlike a black teen-age girl, I guess I’m lucky. The other day at a fast-food restaurant a man made a racist slur to the young girl behind the counter. He blamed her for the riots in Los Angeles because of the color of her skin.

I honestly believed that my generation was far beyond the ideals of old men like the one at the restaurant. But as I listened to kids at school after the “civil unrest,” I couldn’t believe what I heard. Ignorant racist remarks toward blacks were being made all around me. I was completely infuriated. The King verdict and the Los Angeles riots sent race relations back 30 years.

I used to think that my generation was rising above the prejudice that was deeply planted in generations before us. I would not say that prejudice ideals were obsolete in young minds, but for a 17-year-old like myself, I feel my values were progressively above that of our elders, and that a society free of prejudice was in my future.

I wish my fellow students and elders would understand that the Los Angeles riots were not a “black” outcry, they were a “human” outcry against a “human” way of life that must change.

BEVERLY REICHARD

Encino