To the editors:
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The overbearing cheekiness of such questions as those makes one wonder if they aren’t intended as satire. Jarrett writes for a newspaper in a city of 1 1/4 million or more African Americans (a majority over whites). It is estimated that more than half of the Sun-Times bought are by Blacks. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans read it (and Jarrett). The paper would go out of business were it not for the Black customer; and you talk as though it is a “privilege” for the Sun-Times to permit Jarrett to write for it (you must be satiring). Leaving alone the number of Black readers of Jarrett, and buyers and readers of the Sun-Times, and the fact that Jarrett is one of the best journalists in the country, you haughtily question whether he “. . . offends thoughtful white people. . .” (most of whom buy the Tribune).
About this “Rhodes-scholar” banner that is waved by whites so conspicuously as some signification that Reynolds deserved election because of being such a “scholar”: Look, very few Congresspersons are, or have been Rhodes scholars. For anybody, but African Americans, it’s considered largely irrelevant, given the nature of politics and the Congress. And knowing what many Black Africans think of the way the white colonialist Cecil Rhodes ravaged Africa, and what the selecters of Rhodes scholars look for in the students they pick, and what political maneuvering goes on in the Congress, the north side “thoughtful” whites have been overestimating their intellectual attributes.
Michael Miner replies:
