I am writing to you in this manner not only because I respect you, but because I love you, too. I love you in the sense of Dr. Martin Luther King's love called "agape" or unconditional, self-sacrificial love. I have read your editorial and rather than feelings of anger expressed by some, I feel a sense of sadness.

It saddens me to believe that you, like those you castigate, have become a hater. It saddens me that you could stigmatize "85 to 90 percent" of white people as "devout racists." Where is the difference between such generalizations of those who say all young black males are muggers or most unwed black mothers have babbies to collect welfare? It saddens me for you to believe your opinions are "irrefutable" when there is abundant information which you could have used and which, in fact, refutes several of your assertions.

I am sure only a small percentage of people were not apalled by the deaths at C.U.N.Y. A number of analyses of that event have ascribed responsibility to a variety of people including the promoter who oversold the event and had established inadequate security and entrance procedures. To say that the New York police, a growing percentage of whom are black and hispanic, would figure, "It's only niggers. Let'em kill each other," is an unsubstantiated conclusion. You call Mayor Dinkins a Negro in what I assume is meant to be a disparaging comment and a questioning of his credentials as a black person. Are you aware of the battles that David Dinkins fought for people like you? Would you prefer that Ed Koch was still mayor?

The African-American heritage dinner, which you also belittle, consisted of food that our "esteemed brother, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr." himself praised, sought out and consumed with relish and regularity. This is discussed in A Balm In Giliad and other books about Dr. King.

Moreover, many of these items associated with African-American traditional cuisine have origins in Africa including collard greens, black-eyed peas and okra. Black people have historically eaten those foods and many continue to do so. Many also eat watermelon, chitterlings, pigs feet, and ham hocks often, and unfortunately, out of economic necessity.

Nutritional considerations aside, we must recognize that it has been the racism that you decry which has stigmatized and demeaned certain foods as they relate to African Americans. Does it matter that people all over the world produce and consume watermelon. The wicked mind in America created a negative image if African-American males and attached a watermelon to that image, and we all have been doing the moonwalk ever since to distance ourselves from that image. If you want to attack, attack and destroy the image. The food is not value-laden. The image is. And those who would perpetuate the image would find another food to use if every single African American never ate another chicken leg or slice of watermelon. Lawrence Young did not legitimize the menu. My grandmother, my mother, the mothers and grandmothers of my firends and maybe even your grandmothers legitimized that menu.

I trust your judgment enough to know that you recognize, as do many others, that racism in institutional and individual forms is still a plague upon our society. Our esteemed Dr. King spoke to this issue on many occasions including the following:

"To develop a sense of Black consciousness and peoplehood does not require that we scorn the white race as a whole. It is not the race per se that we fight, but the policies and ideology that leaders of that race have formulated to perpetuate oppression." Would Dr. King be placed in the white-loving "Negro" category by a "radical militant" like you describe yourself?

I think you have listened to too many Malcolm X-Louis Farrakhan tapes, and not read enough books. I am sure you are aware of how Arabs and Africans are implicated in the slave trade. While it is easy to catalog the history of racist dehumanization, we should all be about more than that. Does one affirm ones humanity by dehumanizing others? If so, then the adage -- choose your enemies well for that's who you become like -- is true. Perhaps I am naive, but I believe you have to trust individuals not races. There are many black individuals -- Mobutu Sese Seko, Jonas Savimbi, Clarence Thomas -- that I wouldn't trust but others might. There are many white individuals that I would trust -- as did Dr. King -- because they have proven and continue to prove that their humanity supersedes their ethnicity.

I, too, have read of the theories about AIDS being a laboratory creation and have seen "The Strecker Memorandum," and would urge others to do so. The fact that some members of our nation's military along with some political leaders have seen biological warfare as reasonable speaks to a certain level of insanity. If AIDS is a man-made disease, then man has committed suicide because this virus, unlike man, does not discriminate. AIDS is an ironic equalizer that plagues Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. But theories must undergo rigorous proof to be accepted as fact. You are inaccurate in your depiction of the Tuskegee experiment. The men were not injected with syphilis. They were diagnosed but left untreated while being observed. It was two white men -- Edward Kennedy and Peter Buxtun -- who exposed and ended this experiment.

One of the tactics of bigots is to dehumanize and demonize a class or race of people. We are in the midst of another efforts by Americans to demonize the Japanese and blame them for all of our problems. The Japanese, as you know, have demonized black people as the source of America's woes. Are we to now become perpetrators of that which we despise when it's done to us?

Surely you cannot believe that there are no "black-white relationships that have ever been productive?" I know of a number of individual cases, and I marvel at their resilience considering the stress they must endure in a society of closed minds. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) are but two examples of productive black-white relationships. Shall we ignore the relationship of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Scherner in Mississippi? Shall we overlook the sacrifice of Viola Liuzzo and other martyrs of the Civil Rights movement? Shall we discount the community building efforts of locations like Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where committed citizens acted affirmatively to prevent "white flight" and created a truly multi-cultural, multi-racial power sharing community?

You surely must know that "white power" lies only in the hands of a few and that the majority are as victimized and powerless as African Americans, only their powerlessness is camouflaged behind concepts like racial solidarity when economics and opportunity are the real dividing lines. Racism is a wedge issue that separates black have-nots from white have-nots. By lumping all whites into the pool of "racists," you do the work of the real hard-core racists who would have all the whites believe that blacks are their enemy.

Your very words legitimize the claims of the David Dukes and Richard Butlers of the world who warn the whites to arm themselves for the race war that is to come. Rather than building bridges of understanding between those who, with some thought, should be natural allies, you have created fences of fear, anger and suspicion. You said "white folks will used anything and anyone to achieve their goals." Sometimes people don't even recognize that their actions and words are contributing to goals they oppose.

Of course, the most inflammatory statement you made was the suggestion about bearing arms and sending those who threaten us to the cemetery. Was that from "The Bullet of the Ballot" or "The Message to the Grass Roots?" Today in America, millions of our citizens are armed. It is no feat to get an Uzi or a 9 millimeter. Some 12-year olds in Philadelphia, Newark and New York "pack heat." Anyone who picks up a paper can see the results of those "defensive" weapons. Ironically the guns are used to terrorize, not protect the black community. Chedell Williams didn't lose her life and her gold earrings to some white racist with a gun. The overwhelming majority of the 486 murders in Washington, D.C. last year involved hand guns and black males as victim and perpetrator. Instead of increasing the peace you suggest, we pump up the violence in a nation about to drown in blood. Do you believe that our esteemed brother Dr. King would subscribe to your perscription?

Racism is a double-edged sword that damages the victim and the victimizer. That damage may be physical, or it may be psychological, or it may be both. Anger at racism can be as dangerous as racism itself, for that too can consume and distort the personality. Our esteemed Dr. King has said: "Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear; only love can do that. Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it."

It is possible that you will see this as evidence of my "Negro-ness." I am willing to match my consciousness, my cultural involvement and my commitment to black people and values with you or anyone else. I do not subscribe to the belief that in order to combat racism I must become like the racists. That doesn't mean accomodating racism nor does it mean ignoring it.

Writers know that words are seeds, and they should be sown carefully. I urge you to not allow anger to cloud your vision and direct your pen. I urge you with the aforementioned feeling of "agape" to research, organize and reflect.