I read Walter Backstrom often and there is always a nagging question afterward – “What kind of guy is he? What was his life like? Where and how were those opinions formed?”

I am a 75-year-old white, anglo-saxon male, born on a Mississippi cotton farm who was sent by his employer to the State of Washington 39 years ago and decided to stay and raise his children here. I have lived the insult his grandfather received when he was a youth. I also know that for every atrocity observed there, I also observed tens of thousands of instances of humanity, kindness, love and goodwill. The latter is not known outside the South because we had no media to tell the story and, what the

hell, who wants to hear about good things between the races in the South? It is better to portray the South as a place of total hatred. Give them what they expect.

I wonder, if the government worker had said the same words to me, how would we classify it? Surely not racist. Did her words become racist simply because of the difference in color of one’s epidermis? She would be a bitch either way but said to me, it is bitchiness and to you, racist. There is something wrong there, something incomplete.

Continue your good work. Continue to speak out. You owe it to Dr. King.

Ben Mabus, Bellevue