Letter to the Editor
Bennett Carpenter, the young author of a column published on January 19, has bought into the defeatist and, ultimately, racist notion that something called “white privilege” is enough to keep the black population in metaphorical chains. We are to believe that blacks are so weak as a group that they cannot succeed without some action or inaction from whites. Indeed, the article calls for a challenge to "white fragility" ( a mythical concept that somehow overshadows the First Amendment). His message is that blacks are not masters of their collective or individual fates, evidently helpless to change or improve their own situation. Ironically, the column devotes the majority of its space to a discussion of white fragility, not the power of the black individual. This is condescension of a high order.