I've been meaning to post this letter for several months now. A bit of background: During what later became an aborted course of graduate study, I decided to enroll in an LDS Institute course. For all of my collegiate and law school studies I attended Institute. The false doctrine propounded, typically from the instructors, were pretty horrendous during that time. Yet I kept attending, mostly because I felt that there needed to be some kind of doctrinal counterweight for the other students.
The events leading to this letter, however, marked, I think, the last time I will ever try to attend Institute. Upon entering the Institute building, I wandered around to the classroom where my course was going to be taught. As I turned a corner in the hallway, I encountered a couple of white college students. In all seriousness, one of them said to the other, "Well, at least there aren't that many black people here."
There was no hint of anything but pure, overt racism in what I had witnessed. So I turned around and left the building, went home and wrote down in a letter what I had heard and why that meant I had to withdraw from the course and never return to that Institute. The letter above arrived in my mailbox a week or so afterwards.
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