Columnist misses mark in Gates flap

Columnist Susan Estrich ("Change the realities of racism first") has a very strange take on reality. She proposes that it's appropriate for police officers to treat black men "differently" than white men, because "three-quarters of the inmates (presumably in American prisons) are black and Hispanic men."

She describes Sgt James Crowley responding to a call about a "possible break-in" and finding "an angry black man." I suggest that Sgt Crowley, when he entered the house's kitchen, actually found a 5 feet 7 inch, gray-haired professor who uses a cane, who was on the phone calling his property manager about the malfunctioning door on his house.

As Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr, noted (quoted Associated Press on July 24), the ridiculous arrest demonstrated "the vulnerability of black men in America," which appears to me to be a truer "cause" of the over-incarceration of blacks and Hispanics than, as Estrich suggests, a "reality" of danger in every encounter with a person of color.

If you'd be interested in what Henry Louis Gates is really like, his short (216 page) and engaging memoir of his childhood in the '50s and '60s in West Virginia, Colored People (1994), is available in many suburban public libraries. As a coming-of-age story, it's especially appropriate reading for high school students.

Edna E. Heatherington

Glen Ellyn