White

AS YOU read St. Louis journalist Harper Barnes' new history, "Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked the Civil Rights Movement," it's hard not to zero in on the cold reality that this is a single nation of multiple histories. And some of them are not pretty. Barnes' book centers on a race riot in East St. Louis, Ill., on July 2 and 3, 1917, that killed at least 48 men, women and children, 39 of them black, and destroyed a large swath of mostly black neighborhoods across the Mississippi River from St. Louis.

If the four white officers involved in the King beating are found guilty of violating King's civil rights and/or the four black accused rioters are found not guilty, will the white people in Los Angeles burn and plunder white neighborhoods? Should they? Would all politicians, black and white, denounce their actions as they should have the earlier riots? JIM NOEL San Diego

It's bad enough that "white bashing" is becoming so popular that even some whites are applauding it. But when letter writer Rick Edelstein stated that "racism was invented by white people," that was too much. The Chinese and Japanese didn't visit America to learn their bad behavior. It wasn't white racism that gave the Jews a hard life in early history. And blacks made slaves of blacks long before white men did. "We have been downtrodden" as an excuse for bad behavior, black racism and white guilt manipulation is getting old. So is the subject matter of Lee's films.

Joy Rackemann, I take it seriously. As a black man who goes to the movies frequently, I take offense when in scenes of restaurant, crowds, even entire cities, I see not one black face. It must be nice for a white person to take her white children to movies that show a world populated entirely by white people. A nice fantasy . . . but hardly a fact. HOWARD L. MOORE Los Angeles