I struck a nerve two weeks ago when I suggested that all Americans, Latinos especially, owe a collective thank you to black people for their struggles for equality.
Recognizing this truth, and teaching our children that black people fighting for their own freedom helped free all of us, I argued, can help combat intolerance in communities where blacks and Latinos live side by side.
I got more than 300 messages, mostly positive. Dozens of black people thanked me for "saying what someone . . . in the Latino community needed to say."
But others launched into a refrain I hear whenever I write the word "Latino."
I see it routinely in my e-mail inbox after nearly every column I write.
The gist: Deport illegals, who bring with them nothing but trouble, and this country will be a whole lot better.
Which brings me to another useful lesson to be found in black history.
Until relatively recently, really, it was socially acceptable to express hateful racist stereotypes against black people in popular culture and media.
Jack London was one of America's most famous writers when Jack Johnson became the first black boxer to win the heavyweight championship in 1908. When London greeted that win by calling for a "great white hope" to vindicate the superiority of the white race, no one boycotted his books or shamed him into an apology. Back then, it was perfectly fine for whites to suggest blacks were inferior.
Casual racism against blacks was so prevalent for so long in America, it survives now in all sorts of strange places. You can rent the DVD for the 1940 comedy "His Girl Friday," for instance, and suddenly hear a slur for a black child slip into the witty banter between Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell.
Pick up any work of African American fiction written between 1865 and 1965, and you'll feel the weight of the oppressive racism the novelist Richard Wright described in "Native Son," a hatred directed at "12 million people . . . [who] constitute a separate nation, stunted, stripped and held captive within this nation. . . ."
It took a lot of blood and tears to cleanse our public discourse of the most overt racism against black people and push it out onto the fringes of American culture.
But today, in this supposedly enlightened age, another form of socially acceptable racism is gaining ground.
