To the editor:
Last week, I read a letter to the editor, “Praise for Swampscott Strong” (Hersh Goldman, Item April 29), whose upbeat title and opening lines betrayed the pitiless bile aimed at the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement that followed. It was an obvious example of premeditated ignorance so often used as a cover for overt racism.
Any effort to research the advent of Black Lives Matter would reveal the well-documented atrocities in streets and in courtrooms that fueled its creation, and the reasons Black Americans would believe that the American justice system is balanced against them — that they don’t matter as much.
Verdicts are fallible, like the human beings that return them. The anger expressed by BLM as a result is healthy and appropriate.
I understand that the point of a newspaper’s editorial section is to expose readers to a variety of points of view, but readers also rely on the judgment of editors to know when someone has crossed a line from expression of a good-faith point of view to an ignorant rant.
This letter crossed that line. The city of Lynn and the greater readership of The Item counted on you to know the difference.
Paul R. Cormier
Lynn