Greetings, Professor Graglia,

You seem like a thoughtful and educated man and given your decades of teaching experience, including your current post as a University of Texas Law Professor, you may not have meant to diminish the performance efforts of non-white students in college settings.

But what you stated in last month’s interview with BBC Radio had the same chilling effect. Your responses to columnist Gary Younge, stated, in part, that Blacks score 200 points lower than their white peers on the SAT and that three-quarters of Black children are born out of wedlock, which can inhibit their success.

You took things a step further and asserted that affirmative action is no longer needed because “racial discrimination stopped” (?!?) and the reason that more Blacks didn’t make it to enrollment, much less graduation, “because they don’t meet the qualifications.”

I honestly can’t determine what’s most outrageous: your acting as if 40-odd years of an established Civil Rights Act has the power to wipe out centuries of legalized prejudice, or your arrogant implication that single parenthood never occurs within, or negatively impacts, students who happen to be white.

Predictably, since the University of Texas is already under scrutiny due to its affirmative action program being challenged in the Supreme Court, your remarks have garnered the same outrage you garnered in 1997. You then declared to a conservative student group that Black and Mexican-American cultures “seem not to encourage achievement” cased members of United Latin American Citizens Council No. 1 (LULAC) to demand your resignation. An outspoken bigot is better than a closeted one, I guess.

To this particular African-American woman, it’s not about the content of your conversation as much as it is the lofty perch of academia from whence you speak.

I expect, for example, that uninformed individuals will look at the indisputable progress made by Blacks in this country (the historic reelection of this nation’s first African-American President comes to mind) and decide that such protections are no longer needed. But when an educated instructor such as yourself disregards the roadblocks that have disproportionately plagued Blacks for generations (poverty, racial profiling, higher incarceration rates, longer prison sentences for victimless crimes, etc.) and still expects them to perform as well as white peers who’ve usually circumvented those obstacles, the practice negates the long-term effects of racism and perpetuates the myth that being anything other than white guarantees an inferior existence.

Few scenarios are more condescending than someone negating one’s hardships just because they’ve never witnessed or experienced that reality for themselves, and a disdainful avoidance of the obvious is what reeks from your infuriating exchange with BBC.

I know I’m not a colleague of yours, but if you want to be considered a part of the solution instead of the problem, I would suggest that you start by realizing that Blacks are not simply darker-skinned whites, but an ethnic group that has survived generations of legally-sanctioned discrimination and second-class citizenship. Anyone can lament racial quotas and decry the practice of affirmative action, but it takes more effort to address those long-term inequalities and apply solutions than it does to overlook them.

Am I saying that single parenthood is not a true hardship? Of course not. But what I am saying, Prefoessor Graglia, is that tenured professors shouldn’t confuse a symptom of our perpetual struggle as the main cause. Multi-generational poverty isn’t that simple to overcome. And apparently, neither is stubborn prejudice.