Letters: Racism still have painful effects

Please do not try to understand the experience of black people in America if you have not walked in their shoes. Racism no longer employs chains and the lash, but it still has a most pernicious hold on the minds and feelings of the American people.

Black men were vilified and transformed into wild beasts in order to prevent race mingling: kill the brute, lynch the brute, etc. Today we have the school-to-prison pipeline, the fear of young black men in school, the condescension toward African-American names (La-sha for example). We should not allow anyone to make subtle degrading remarks about others, black, white or any other ethnicity.

We can be much better than this. All great nations rise and will fall. It’s how a nation treats all of its citizens that determines how history judges us.