Throughout my 82 years, I rarely thought of myself as a “white American.” As I witnessed the ebb and flow of race relations, my perception of blacks’ complains usually depended on the tact and diplomacy evident during delivery of their leader’s message.

Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. had a superb style that encouraged non-blacks to seriously consider the merits of his message. When he claimed to have “seen the Promised Land,” most Americans honestly believed him, and we were glad, while the content of modern black leaders’ complaints and delivery style have been strikingly irritating; sometimes their leaders act as harbingers of militant black racism.

Frankly, as a leader, Obama is obnoxious, perhaps deliberately. His recent lament, referring to the recent Florida criminal trial [of George Zimmerman] that’s monopolized the news—“It could have been me”—strongly suggests a crude “poor me” attitude associated with an unshakeable “persecution complex.”

With reference to Obama’s suggestion for a conversation in America about race, Pat Buchanan instructed him that racism’s “ugliest manifestation is in interracial crime, and especially interracial crimes of violence.” Buchanan pointed out “that while white criminals choose black victims 3% of the time, black criminals choose white victims 45% of the time.” Based on Buchanan’s stellar reputation as an accurate author, his sobering statistics force me as a white American to believe that “it could have been me.”

Here is my hypothesis: neither whites nor blacks, collectively, are persecuted in America, as a group, while a relatively few in both races are persecuted. As a society we can work to prevent persecution of individuals, but the notion that whites or blacks as a group are being persecuted—“get over it.”

Dan Billard

Narrowsburg, NY