Effects of ‘Wilding’

Re “Taking ‘Wilding’ to the Stage,” Elizabeth Zimmer’s Feb. 18 article on a Keith Antar Mason play that grew out of a rampage by young black men in New York’s Central Park:

White skinheads (also alleged victims of poverty and broken homes) also have used Mason’s rite-of-passage reasoning to kick people around.

Any group, black or white, that tries to prove manhood through aggression against the innocent destroys its own humanity and destroys the community.

Whether the word is wilding or working (to use Mason’s terms), the act of going out to find someone to intimidate to prove one’s manhood is stupid and crazy. Not once is Zimmer’s article is the word criminal used.

SYLVIA MARCIN

Altadena