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Dear Editor:
Thank you Wm Michael Britt for the reply. I hope the Chronicle continues to survive free for all voices. However, freedom of speech is under assault today from a cancerous cancel culture within the Democrat Party. Let us resolve to deny it sanctuary. I will defend your right to be heard with every breath I have.
After the hands up, don't shoot lie still believed today by many I realized the need to dig deeper on deep root issues, deeper than citing one poll which gives people's feelings at one moment in time. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Just a few years earlier the same poll had a different result. What happened? The distortion and sensationalizing of a few cases involving police shootings is what happened.
Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer, who happens to be Black, found in a 2016 study that Blacks were not more likely to be shot than whites by the police. However, the narrative by some sports stars and politicians is that Blacks are being hunted by the police. That is a lie. On the other hand, Black men are stopped more often by police in some large cities on mere suspicion, the so-called driving while Black, which is an over zealous reaction to the fact that Black men commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime and vehicle grand theft. That is a local department problem, not a national systemic problem.
It takes a good amount of bird dogging today which most people don't do or hear from a media that is 90% liberal and increasingly intolerant to 'unwoke' conservative viewpoints.
Look at the 2 recent resignations from the NY Times over not being woke enough. Bari Weiss, a liberal Jew, was called a Nazi by her co-workers.
What facts do you have that systemic racism is keeping Blacks from succeeding today? You cite only old facts. Jim Crow and redlining were outlawed with the civil rights laws of the 1960's, over 50 ago. Really.
Martin Luther King said in 1968 that America had made great progress in civil rights. I am white but my facts come from brilliant Americans such as Thomas Sowell and Larry Elder principally, along with other great Americans like Robert Woodson, Walter Williams, Shelby Steele, and David Webb, who happen to be Black. Larry Elder has a new hit documentary titled Uncle Tom. How many of you have ever read or heard these men? What does my race have to do with any facts and examples I cite?
Booker T. Washington pegged the Democrat Party exactly way back in 1911 in his book My Larger Education. From page 119 preceded by his doctor parable story, "I am afraid that there is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don't want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease (racism) holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public."
The Democrat Party has no interest in a post-racial society because it has no interest in giving up the power a victimized Black electorate provides. If it did it would have sought to strengthen Black families to get Black men back in the home. An over 70% out of wedlock birth rate is a titanic disaster. They just keep selling fear and accusing Republicans of racism. Pathetic.
I want one of America's greatest minds ever, Thomas Sowel, author of over 40 books, to close my letter with four of his profound and insightful quotes. "The Black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state."
"If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago, and a racist today." "Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, social justice." "If you want to see the poor remain poor, generation after generation, just keep the standards low in their schools and make excuses for their academic shortcomings and personal misbehavior. But please don't congratulate yourself on your compassion."

Gregory Erickson
Dodgeville