Letter: Comparison off point

I always read Leonard Pitts’ columns, and they almost always irritate me, but his June 6 column, “Snoop Dogg turns back on history, his ‘Roots’,” made me cringe.

He criticizes Snoop Dogg for a comment that too many films about slavery are being made and that more films should be made about black people being successful. This is a horrible thing to say, according to Pitts.

Pitts cited Wikipedia, a reliable source as we all know, and declared that only 46 films have been made about slavery while 136 have been made about the Holocaust, which he reminds us ended in 1945. Films have been made only since the early 20th century, so it’s illegitimate to count the first 50 years after abolition in that configuration.

Whole generations of people were wiped out in World War II, while the descendants of slaves are mostly still here.

He points out that Jews leaving a movie theater don’t rub shoulders with the heirs of Nazi Germany the way blacks in America rub shoulders with the descendants of their nazis. Well, he’s wrong again, because Jews who live in Germany do. If they rub shoulders with an old German they know, there’s a good chance he was sipping coffee and reading the paper while his Jewish neighbors were being pulled from their homes and “relocated.” A black who rubs shoulders with a white in America, even if it’s an old guy, can at most speculate that perhaps his great-grandparents had slaves.