THE EDITOR, Sir:
I TAKE issue with Dawn Ritch's article in the Sunday Gleaner of July 27, wherein she, rather unreasonably and insultingly, intimated that one's failure to accept responsibility for his action or inaction is tantamount to being black.
In that article, Ms Ritch, responding to fellow columnist Melville Cooke in their ongoing race-related journalistic bicker, asserted that Minister John Junor by his physical appearance could be considered a white or brown man. However, such a white or brown appearance of his was overpowered by whatever amount of blackness that constitutes his make-up, when he denied or refused to accept responsibility for the unforgivable situation involving our children's homes and places of safety.
In Ms Ritch's view, only a black man, notorious for becoming a father only in the limited sense of impregnating as many women as he possibly can, but not on account of his fulfilling the attendant responsibilities of fatherhood, would have denied responsibility in such a situation.
Admittedly, many black men are in fact deadbeat fathers, but deadbeat dads can also be found in other ethnic or so-called racial groups. However, this dreadful behaviour of so many black men has been influenced or conditioned by, in addition to traditional roots and practices in the African culture and the persistent poverty and poor socio-economic condition, the experience of slavery and exploitation.
We need to understand that the abominable process of slavery had different effects on slave men and slave women. Slave women, though oftentimes raped and sexually assaulted by the white slave owners or masters, were able to continue their basic responsibilities of motherhood.
I am etc.,
KKO SANGSTER
sangstek@msn.com
Elkins Park
Pennsylvania
