One night laid bare our bigotry
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This one is for Ralph Spencer of Seattle, and for what I failed to say about the events of That Tuesday.
What I said was that women took sexual liberties - and terrible risks - that night. What I didn't say is that one of them was a "white girl savagely beaten by a mob of black thugs."
At least that's how Spencer saw it. And he saw my silence as cowardice.
"You're a double-standard, political-correct feminist liberal with no spine," he wrote me. "The phrase `hate crime' is not in your vocabulary unless it's whites beating blacks.
"You deserve to be raped and beaten for your ... subservience to the criminal African-American community."
His threat doesn't scare me. It's the phrase "criminal African-American community" I find most fearsome.
So much for progress in the greatest society on Earth. A bunch of brass-knuckled thugs beat up on people in a crowd at Pioneer Square, and we herd the entire black community into a corner and shake our Wonder Bread heads.
Consider this from Arturo Edwards of Renton who called to vent. For him, Mardi Gras was validation of a view already darkened when his grandson was attacked by two young black men two months ago.
"I'm a minority, too, and we are not doing what the blacks are doing," he said. "They are overdoing it, and they are getting away with too much."
Harsh as Spencer and Edwards sound, the underlying refrain is a chronic one. However torn our feelings about race, what we saw at Mardi Gras sewed up our basest beliefs.
And if I lack the courage to say that The Problem has a color, then - according to Spencer - I should pay with pain.
Well, let me shake up my mace can and brace myself for attack, because I ain't doing it. I refuse to paint an entire group with a wilding brush.
What we need is not more talk-radio rhetoric, but a meaningful discussion of what happened in Pioneer Square.
Mayor Paul Schell has appointed a task force to study the mess that was Mardi Gras. Among his dictums: find out what provoked the violence. Why did a mob grow so frenzied that one young man was killed?
"Race will be a factor" in the task-force discussions, said Schell spokesman Dick Lilly.
Bridging the color divide is more than a "task." It's moving the moon and stars.
I stayed out of this fray, afraid that whatever I said would be wrong. And it has not been a comfortable silence. I saw what everyone else saw at Mardi Gras: blacks beating on whites at random, and with astonishing rage.
Could I say that here, though? No. I wasn't there that night. And blacks weren't the only ones with clenched fists.
The real reason for my reticence is that I am white, and was raised in a life of privilege and relative ease. I have only that perspective to offer.
And I have my mail, disturbing evidence of a city where the veneer of civility has been stripped away, exposing an aged and ugly intolerance.
"Let the black people know that they are going to have to cooperate, and lose their attitude," Edwards said, "if any of us are going to get along."
The black people? Where do I start?
Better yet, where do any of us?
Nicole Brodeur's column appears on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. She can be reached at 206-464-2334, or at nbrodeur@seattletimes.com. She's seldom rendered speechless.