I read John Carlson’s articles, even when I disagree with them, but this time his misinformation and misunderstanding in the column, “Race and Hypersensitivity,” needs some clearing up because it will unknowingly offend many Bellevue residents of color.

I am a white male who lives in Bellevue. I have lived a life a privilege because I am white. I am writing this to all the other white people in Bellevue who feel the same emotions and think the same thoughts as John Carlson does on this issue. Our feelings and thoughts are valid on this issue mostly because we don’t know any better. Here’s “the truth” that Mr. Carlson should have written.

The anger Dr. Gates showed in response to the incident at his house is completely valid. It is not a hypersensitivity to a one-time event. The anger Dr. Gates felt when he was arrested is the same anger many of the people of color in Bellevue feel every day because they have been racially profiled not once, or twice, or three times, but many, many times throughout their lives.

It happens when they are followed by a sales person when they walk into a store at Bellevue Square. It happens on 148th Avenue when they are asked to pop their trunks if they are pulled over for having a taillight out. It happens when they are served last in a restaurant in Eastgate. The point is that the lives of people of color are filled with experiences of racial profiling.

Contrary to what Carlson said about looking at reality through a lens of race, we have to stop belittling and dismissing the experiences of people of color because we as whites don’t share their experience.

Dismissing others’ experiences, especially a whole group of peoples’ experiences just adds to their feelings of powerlessness and, yes, anger. Just because we don’t share those experiences as whites doesn’t mean they don’t happen in Seattle or Renton or Bellevue. They do. Just because it makes us as whites uncomfortable to accept that experience doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen. It does.

To really get to the bottom of our racially fractured community, we need to spend less time talking and more time listening and not judging from a perspective of political dogma.

Paul Sutton, Bellevue