Blame the Victim

Dear editor:

Now I’ve seen it all. In today’s paper (Sunday, Feb. 14th) there is a letter speaking of bigotry against African-Americans with the wildest explanation for the causation of it all. It seems the writer believes that due to the likes of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan, all of whom I see as self serving and not truly interested in their people, that out and out bigotry is understood and is nothing more than tit-for-tat reaction by whites. Isn’t that wonderful and original? Blame Blacks for the horrors that have been committed against them and the continued bigotry we see both as obvious and unspoken?

With convoluted thinking like this it makes one wonder if we should blame the Christians for their deaths when they were fed to the lions by the Romans, or the Native Americans for the continued horrors and lands stolen by American settlers, or the Africans who were kidnapped from their native countries and sold as slaves, or the 6,000,000 Jews who were slaughtered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Blame the victim?

I’ve written before about both out and out bigotry and bigotry by allowing the former to fester. Let’s face it, the letter in today’s paper defined both types of bigotry and should be recognized for what it truly is…..an excuse to hate.