Letter to the editor: Walter Williams' op-ed misleading

On a recent Saturday morning I opened the paper to an op-ed by Walter Williams (“Being a racist is easy today,” Aug. 2, TribLIVE), who has built a career as a black conservative, and who appears to have extreme right-wing views which are biased, if not racist.

I am a self confessed liberal, a white person — and was angry and sad later on that day when this op-ed came out, because our nation would experience the third brutal mass shooting in a week by an alleged white domestic terrorist. I have a First Amendment right to speak if I feel my paper has lost its moral compass. I feel this op-ed is misleading.

His op-ed is wrong about two things: Liberals have many arguments right now, winning ones at that, and we are not “falsely accusing” anyone. That is a right-wing trope. Instead, we look in the mirror and ask ourselves if we know right from wrong.

He’s right about one thing: that older black Americans “need to explain what true racism is … to inform young black people.” There is no such thing as true racism, only just racism. You either got it or you don’t.

It isn’t hard to see why this opinion piece made it into your paper. It’s just so easy to not know what else to print, and it’s “Easy to be Hard,” a song from “Hair,” written when it was hard (and still is hard) to be a protester, a humanitarian, a feminist.

Laurie Lucianne Scheid

New Kensington