A WHITE LIBERAL

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

I am proud to think of myself as a white liberal who hopes that America will one day include a 12 per cent Negro poor population, a 12 per cent Negro rich population, professions of law and medicine composed 12 per cent of Negroes, and so forth. This will be a most difficult thing to accomplish, and blacks and whites who want this to come about must be as tough and realistic as Mustafa Kemal's Turks, Castro's Cubans in the early years, and the Jews of America and Israel. There is need for strict population control, millions of federal dollars, reorganization of ghetto government structures, and wide-open housing.

And what do we hear from blacks at Harvard? Black professors, counselors, etc., "Black" courses, proportional enrollment. The complaints of these comparatively overprivileged Americans must sound self-centered and trivial to sharecroppers and ghetto welfare recipients. Do they care who holds the Negro chair at Harvard? Would a black professor want to be invited to Harvard because of his coloring rather than his ability in teaching and research? I think I would be insulted if I were he.

Harvard should indeed stand in shame for the paucity of its African course offerings--as a concentrator in African History at Yale, however, I ask whether courses on Africa are really any more "relevant" to blacks than to whites, at least in America. The lesson of South Africa should show what it's really like when black and white can't speak to each other without distrust--I hope this is not happening at Harvard, for there are such real problems ahead that will demand cooperation between these Negroes and those whites who want to create the true multi-racial community. B. Alan Dickson 3-L