The letter by Richard W. Colburn (Sept. 18) contains another of those continuing attempts to show what other peoples did to “lift themselves” in this society, attempts that African-Americans ought to do.
What is noteworthy about these apparent African-American deficiencies in dealing with the general state-of-life for black people is how totally ignored is the special history of African-heritage people in this country for more than 350 years. The disregard for that history invalidates the attempted comparisons of the situation of African-Americans with, as Colburn says, “Scandinavians, the Italians, the Irish, numerous Asians. . ..”
Can Colburn really believe that a people who were subject to the federal fugitive slave law-under which they could be hunted down like animals-have developed the “culture” needed to function as those “other” peoples have? Does Colburn imagine that a people kidnapped from their homelands, brought over on slave ships, mentally cleansed of memory of those homelands, were not and are not affected in dissembling and destructive ways that will take many generations of “curing?”
