Letter: Editorial position misses the mark

Regarding the March 24 editorial 'Parents are responsible, but so is the community”:

I commend NAACP member Rita Robinson and city council member Justin Shields for their statements regarding the shootings in Cedar Rapids. It's particularly courageous for Robinson to ask, 'Where are the parents?” when she risks being called 'not black enough” for doing so.

The Gazette's response to their comments was disappointing. The 'solutions” The Gazette offers to this violence are patronizing and to some degree already being done. The excuses offered, such as racism, ring hollow when a Gazette columnist has to write an entire column about the 'quasi racist” term 'colored people” being used by a political candidate instead of the term 'people of color.” If that is an example of the 'heavy burden of racism and cultural debasement” The Gazette claims is causing this violence, The Gazette's reasoning is weak.

The Gazette's condescension toward black Americans reminds me of a story the late, thoughtful, black comedian Godfrey Cambridge told about going to a posh dinner party attended by white 'limousine lefties” in Manhattan. During dinner he noticed the other guests furtively watching him as he was handed the mashed potatoes. Impishly, Cambridge took his serving by dipping his hands in the bowl clamshell fashion. The other guests just whispered, 'Don't say anything.” The Gazette's editorialists would have been right at home at that 1960s party. Their blacks-as-victims stereotype prevents them from holding blacks to the same standard they hold others. My experience in life has been if you don't expect much, you won't get much.

Kurt Maas

Coggon