Dear Anonymous: About that racist letter you sent here | COMMENTARY

“I know you will not have the courage to print this,” writes the anonymous someone who did not have the courage to sign the letter I hold in my hands. It arrived at The Baltimore Sun recently, offering a list of “six things Blacks can do to help reduce prejudice and racial profiling.”

That might sound earnest, even well-meaning. But, within another sentence or two, the letter proved as racist as the many others that have landed on my desk over the years, though not as profane.

Unless they offer a news tip, I usually do not bother with anonymous letters. I have little use for those who won’t attach their names to their views, especially on matters racial.

Therefore, you won’t see extensive quoting of the letter here today. That’s not due to lack of courage. It’s due to a personal rule against providing platforms for bigots, particularly anonymous ones. And besides, I’ve heard it all before, and so have most of you. Racists have been pushing the same garbage about people of color since the first slave ship docked.

I would not ordinarily do this, but we’re at a special “woke” moment in American history, so I felt compelled to address the letter writer who chose this time to share his “advice” to Black Americans.

To whom it may concern:

I have no way of knowing who you are, but I suspect you are a white man. Maybe I’m type-casting here, but it’s fitting: My racial/gender group always seems to be the most fragile when it comes to facing the long history of racism in America, and white guys, starting with the one in the Oval Office, seem to be the most offended by the Black Lives Matter movement. So it follows that a white guy, perhaps sitting at home watching Fox News and getting worked up about the protests of the last two months, would feel a need to tell me what’s wrong with the country and what would make America “great again.”

And so you provide a litany of tired complaints, assigning to Black people all kinds of negative traits and behaviors easily found to varying degrees among all demographic groups. I know that’s hard to believe, but you could just Google the subjects you raised and get some perspective. There’s so much credible demographic data about American society at your fingertips these days, you’d have to be willfully ignorant to ignore it.

And that’s the real problem. Based on your letter, you don’t seem interested in understanding the roots of the social problems you list, or offering solutions. You seem to think the answer to poverty, for instance, is for poor people to just snap out of it.

We all generally agree that life is what you make it. But that was never true for a great many people who were held back by institutional prejudice. And, while we like to believe that everyone has a crack at the Great American Dream, Black people were forbidden from even trying for most of our history. Now, with an economy-stifling pandemic on top of worsening income inequality, a lot of Americans, Black and white, have lost hope of ever reaching that dream.

I wonder if you agree with this: America was considered an exceptional nation, but for many reasons, we have slipped, and you know that and hate it, and you’re looking for someone to blame, so you point everywhere but to the white power class.

I could be wrong, but I’m also guessing you do not live in Baltimore. Indeed, I’ll bet you’ve lived your whole life away from the city, with no daily contact with Black people.

I’ll speculate further that your views reflect those of your parents and grandparents. Am I right? Your father used to gripe out loud about people of color, didn’t he? Or maybe it was your mother. Or maybe both of them blamed Black people for a lot of problems. Of course, when you were growing up, you didn’t see your parents as racist; you just assumed they were sharing their world view. News flash: None of us is perfect when it comes to race — in fact, we all stumble, fall and fail at times — but a lot of white kids managed to shed the old prejudices and not become their parents.

I’ll bet you think you’re not a prejudiced person. I bet you would say that your bias is based on what you see in the way of behavior, not skin color. But you refuse to see how those same behaviors prevail throughout the country, or why some people have such a hard time overcoming disadvantages.

I don’t know if you’re a Donald Trump supporter, but if you are, and if you’ve been counting on him to assert white supremacy and raise up the white working class, you only got half of that deal. And now look: He’s trying to stoke more fear and conflict so he can pose as the law-and-order president. You’re not going to fall for that again, are you?

Or maybe you are.

Even so, I hope I’ve given you a few things to think about. Maybe, instead of instructing Black people on how they should live, a little self-reflection would get you to a better place.

There’s a whole new generation of Americans, with eyes wide-open, who want a better country, and you can’t beat them. You ought to consider joining them.