Leonard Pitts is, thankfully, alive and well

Here is Pitts' response to the neo-Nazis, hood-wearers, and general mouth-breathers who've been sending him death threats.

I pity the Neo-Nutsies. How impotent they must feel. How frightened and small. So they console themselves with these delusions of inherent superiority....

I feel a little like Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life. They say you can tell who a man is by looking at his friends. Which is true. But I believe you can also tell by looking at his enemies. Apparently, I have managed to make enemies of haters, bigots and other low, pathetic men.

I must be doing something right.

And that is how you respond to the thugs. More people should take their cue from Pitts when faced with far-right bigots.

On an unrelated note, E.R. Shipp is another outstanding African-American columnist with a Pulitzer to show for it. She used to write for the New York Daily News, but I haven't seen her byline in a while. Now she has a blog. Where are you, E.R.? Come back! Please, come back!

P.S. Pitts has his own Web site. In his FAQ section, he responds to people who want blacks to quit talking about racism:

As to the issue of "getting over it:" I find it intriguing that no one sees a preoccupation with the past when we endlessly celebrate the Greatest Generation for its World War II exploits or commiserate with the soldiers of Vietnam for their suffering. No one has difficulty understanding how the past impacts the present when we're talking about, say, how a 30 year old political scandal – Watergate – reverberates in the cynicism of the succeeding generation.

It seems we only have these problems with the past when the past in question has to do with African Americans and their history. Which suggests to me that the issue here is less black folks' preoccupation with our racial yesterday than some white folks' fear of it. And that's a problem beyond my control.