A ‘Lesson’ in Racial Realities

Victor Merina’s account of his trip to New Orleans (“Walking With Saints, Talking With Fools,” April 29) was an amusing read. Amusing in the fact that he felt “ambushed by reality.” I am 60 years old and could have sized up Sunglass Woman, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and full of chatty drivel about herself, as reality. She’s the reality of a past era. The same for her older, well-meaning seat companion. Don’t feel ambushed; consider it a lesson.

Mary Schwartz

Santa Ana

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Merina, a self-styled diversity expert, has a career based on the premise that this country is overrun with white racism. And then he goes to pieces when he is unable to bully an apology from a Southern bigot whom he overhears using the “N” word on a bus. Is America so overrun with white racism that incidents of the type he describes should be expected as commonplace, or does his devastated reaction really suggest that such incidents are rare--and that hyperbolic racial healing “consultants” like him traffic largely in fiction?

William Johnson

Los Angeles