Editor:

This letter is in response to last week’s editorial entitled "A Story about a Saturday Night," in which Editor Patrick Resing was rightly critical of a racist situation which he witnessed at "The 70s Party" a few weekends ago. I need, however, to amend his statement because in the process of persecuting racism he made completely unfounded generalizations about a group of students at Pomona College — the Kappa Delta fraternity members who threw the party.

Patrick Resing’s article revolves around one specific incident that he witnessed while waiting in line for beer. In his account, the student server which he previously in his article he referred to as "serving his frat brothers first" was the individual that Resing claims to have been racist. The amendment I would like to make is that the server who "flew into a rage" and "stormed off" was not at all a frat brother but a Claremont Colleges employed server who is totally unaffiliated with the fraternity.

With the rest of his article Resing goes on to illustrate some very important points about racism. Resing’s slip-up, however, is very simple-minded and verges on being hypocritical in light of the overall point of his editorial. Out of ignorance Resing simply assumed that this server was a member of the fraternity — this was an unfounded generalization and turned out to be completely false. This simple mistake drew a clear association between racism and the Kappa Delta fraternity. The fraternity members were rightfully upset by this.

Racism is a horrible and unfortunate aspect of all of our lives. We should be acutely sensitive to it and fight it whenever we encounter it. Because it is such a sensitive and powerful issue we also have to be careful whom we call racist. I realize Patrick Resing’s article was not meant to point the finger at Kappa Delta, but the way he relayed his account did yield that association. Resing and I are in total agreement about the detrimental nature of racism anywhere within our society, I would hope that he can also see that ignorant generalization is comparatively destructive.

Sincerely,

Nick Grudin ‘01