Dear Mr. Campbell July 17, 1969
re: Your letter of July 5, 1969 and mine of May 21.
Again I must thank you for replying but you do not state whether or not we can publish your letter in the Vorpal Sword which was the source of this exchange in the first place.
I must disagree with you, again, however, when you stated “prejudice… is a genetic characteristic….” It is not. You would not feel prejudiced towards the 4,600 pound animal with pointed teeth if you were totally innocent of carnivores or animals generally – anymore than you would if it had all molars. A human being is born with the ability to draw conclusions based on previous experiences and/or learning. Truth. But the direction of the prejudice built on this learning is shaped by that learning.
Man, unlike the young duck’s reaction to a hawk silhouette, is not automatically, genetically afraid or hateful of anything: “You’ve got to be careful he thought,” as from the old song. It is the environment which shapes, guides and directs the prejudice and one of the problems in the United States since 1672 has been blacks are seen as inferior and whites the superior.
Now, about the black “loudmouth, irrational, violent militants” you mention – “it is in the job of the blacks” to suppress to “prove” they are not “childish people.” One can turn the tables on whites and say we are the childish ones because we permitted 10 million of our number to vote for Wallace and have permitted vast transgressions against the laws of our land without doing anything effective to stop them with the same for the Italians in the mafia and so on.
It is the job of the society, not a just a disjointed part of it, to “suppress” unlawful or dangerous activity. To suggest otherwise smacks of the vigilantism.
Agreed, all people are not equal, to declare otherwise I’d have to be a Pollyanna, but I refuse to say who is high and who shall be low simply because of a color. It’s not moral, scientific or true and is incredibly wasteful of the talent of those who get outed and expensive to those who do the outing, because, when you eliminate a segment of your population, those left might not include the ones who are really best for the job. Racial nepotism isn’t a rational method to run a society.
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This might seem like an odd place to ask this, but I’m president of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society (of course, all views expressed are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Society or any other group of rational people) which, as you probably know, sponsors the annual PhilCon, which this year will be November 14-16. I would be pleased if you would attend and perhaps you and I could continue this thing face-to-face as there will be plenty of time Friday and Saturday night to thrash this out.
I await your reply to this request to publish your letters and the possibility of you attending the PhilCon.
Sincerely yours,
Ron Stoloff
[How’s that for chutzpah: in the midst of basically saying he’s a racist, I invite him to come to the next PhilCon – on HIS dime!?]
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