Approximately 1 year and 9 months ago, Larry Penner posted his “Reparations Are Not Kosher” opinion piece on these very pages.
A reader responded how he felt this headline was a very poor attempt at humor and felt Larry Penner was a racist. I don’t, which I’ll get into in a minute.
So what better way to respond to a reader’s concerns than to print the exact headline to yet another Penner submission of this opinion piece, likely copied and pasted from his collection of Word documents?
As if something being Kosher was the only standard that mattered?
Yet again, this submission reveals how the author lives in “Larry Penner’s Bizarre Universe.”
I happen to agree with Mr. Penner’s opinion as to the impracticality of reparations. But I find his attitude toward the racism experienced by the Black population equivalent to the husband or wife who is discovered committing adultery and they choose to stay in the marriage but their attitude toward the adultery is “just get over it.”
Has Mr. Penner ever seen pictures of blacks being sold at slave auctions? Enslaved for hundreds of years? Strung up from tree limbs? Working on a chain gang? The big-lipped, bulging eye stereotype prominent in films of the 1930s and 1940s?
Blacks in films being portrayed as maid and servants and shoe shine men and men’s room attendants? Does he also understand the fact that as recently as 55 years ago blacks and whites were not allowed to marry in some states? Is Mr. Penner’s “just get over it” attitude at all realistic?
As for Mr. Penner’s statement that we’ve all learned to look beyond skin color, that too is a falsehood. Recently I was in a union training when one of the union officials said in front of two white men (I was one of them) the Supreme Court is a bunch of white men making decisions in the lives of Blacks. Racism is far from dead.
I don’t think Larry Penner is a racist. I think he is at times incredibly ignorant (not stupid), has an insatiable addiction to seeing his name in print, and will write anything long on rhetoric but short on fact to see his name in print.
I think for every one incredibly cogent opinion piece he posts nine ludicrous ones. I think he lives in his own universe. Larry Penner’s Bizarre Universe.
Nat Weiner
Bronx
