Objection to White Teacher at CSUN Is Racist

* It seems that the Black Student Union at Cal State Northridge objects to a white woman’s teaching Pan-African studies. They contend the issue is not race but whether she has the cultural background to teach the courses.

I wonder how the union would feel about blacks’ being denied the right to teach European history or English literature, and being told the question isn’t one of race, but whether they have the cultural background?

BURT PRELUTSKY

North Hills

* If your Sept. 4 headline “Black Students Protest White Teacher’s Hiring” had reversed the words “white” and “black,” we would see the Cal State Northridge protesters for what they are: racists.

Why then the double standard? Because at some point the civil rights movement got sidetracked from its original, laudable goal of making race irrelevant. Now race has become so central to some people’s identity that they can’t get beyond it and simply be human.

“This is not a race issue,” Leslie Small, one of the protesters, said of the teacher. “The issue is whether she has the cultural background.” That a black spokesperson can invoke a special “black cultural background” shows how sadly the original civil rights movement has gone off the rails, for at one time only the most blatant white racists would have asserted that there was a special black way of thinking, living, knowing, talking or learning. Skin color, an accident of birth, was to have become as insignificant in daily life as eye color.

This is a race issue. Students who believe that race equals culture, and who then use race as a criterion for judging their instructor, are racists. Our inability to bypass racial differences will only result in more of these unpleasant, unproductive disputes.

HERBERT G. ROSENBLOOM

Sepulveda