Mingle some more

YES, Thomas Gibbons, you should continue to write about blacks, and more people should try to think about and write about blacks, and blacks should write about us. The day when we are all writing about each other, intermingling and intermarrying and every American is a nice beige color, we will at last have solved one of our greatest problems.

ALICE HICKOX SELZER

Oxnard

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ONE can only admire you for your courage to risk controversy by daring to write about African American (or “black”) people. You, of course, realize that such a labor, while rarely attempted, is not unprecedented.

One remembers the hell William Styron caught for writing “The Confessions of Nat Turner.” Styron once wrote about the dressing-down he had to endure for doing so from the actress Beah Richards at a party hosted by Sammy Davis Jr.

I remember too hearing the late Ralph Ellison, black novelist and essayist, deliver a talk at the Philadelphia Free Library many years ago. He said that, for him, William Faulkner was the writer who created the most vivid and believable black characters. And for not only courage but out-and-out nerve, read George Carlin’s famous monologue on “Black” versus “African American.”

The literary imagination and democracy share something valuable. They give us license to get under one another’s skin.

LOUIS J. WASSER

Huntington Beach