In fact, 9/11 didn’t change everything

With a wave of his magic pen and one shallow paragraph worth of history, Jonah Goldberg has decreed America’s black-white race relations solved by the 9/11 tragedy (Opinion, March 2).

Additionally, Goldberg flippantly writes: “President Bush’s decision to drop quotas as a reliable GOP punching bag cooled tempers, too.”

That The Times gives so much space to this caliber of thinking flies in the face of recent realities, such as the Hurricane Katrina tragedy, which not only exposed the reality of poor black America and the state of “black and white” inequalities, it equally exposed the Jonah Goldbergs and their intelligence-insulting commentaries.

GREGORY MAYA

Los Angeles

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Goldberg has gleefully added a new dimension to the shopworn, diversionary neocon slogan that “9/11 changed everything.”

Unbeknownst to us all, 9/11 assigned black Americans to the scrapheap of irrelevancy.

Support for his premise comes from a twisted reading of historical viewpoints on our national struggles and an assertion that since the 1950s, progressives have seen the nation as “monochromatic.”

The reality is that our country was and is still divided into two Americas -- those with means and those without. This is true whether or not people of Goldberg’s political persuasion choose to pay attention to that division or its unchanged demographics.

Ignoring the ever-widening gap between rich and poor doesn’t solve the problem; it makes it fester.

BLAISE JACKSON

Escondido