Dear Editor,

Our high-profile black athletes with deficient intellect and great hubris need to revisit their history rather than repeat it. It is always said that if you don’t know your historical mistakes, you are bound to repeat them. They need the consciousness to realise that impregnating dozens of less unfortunate women and producing inadequately cared-for children do not qualify as fathering these offspring, because indeed, fathering implies a lot more domestic nurturing and responsibilities necessary to raise children in our complex society filled with so many cracks for them to fall through.

This is the most dysfunctional preoccupation of some whose shallow concept of life is led by their unbridled sexual drives and feeling of entitlement to excesses. There are so many urgent things in their communities crying out for their assistance, instead of concentrating on a big house and drving a different sports car every day, and making a nuisance of themselves.

During slavery, the slave master always tried to increase his stock of slaves by encouraging virile males on the plantation to impregnate as many women as possible merely for the procreation of children to increase the plantation’s head count and value of each slave (children included).

This was not fathering then. Neither is it fathering now. But indiscriminate sex and the neglect and abuse of children continue, although in a different context. One has to ask if irresponsible sex is part of the black male’s inherited DNA.

Equally disturbing is the black woman’s choice to disparage her ethnic features and to yearn for Caucasian hair. Black women spend millions of dollars on hairpieces, extensions, weaves, etc, to make their hair look “white”.

It does not matter what Oprah or Kris Rock or Mrs Rock says. This comes from an inferiority complex that the white woman’s hair is better than the black woman’s. This is one of the blights of slavery on the behaviour of many people. Previously, the practice of straightening hair was also observed by the black male who was expected to be less vain.

But many believe that the black male is equally complicit in this display of inferiority complex, because many want their women in these hairpieces, extensions, etc.

L A Bert Ramsay

florissano1@live.com