Gender Terms

Regarding your Oct. 13 editorial about Derek Walcott (“Making All of Mankind One”), I find it sadly ironic that in an editorial which celebrates Walcott’s vision of a “multiracial, multicultural society” you choose words like “mankind” and phrases like “whole populations of men,” which alienate half of your readers, regardless of race or culture. For a newspaper that seems hypersensitive to politically correct language in describing ethnicity, The Times should make a more concerted effort to use more gender-neutral terms like “humankind” and “people.”

NATALIE DUPONT

Burbank