Letter: Racist truth

Liz Hunt's short biography of Professor Patricia Williams ("The lawyer, the slave girl and the rooster's egg", 5 January) ended with her saying "Racism is a human invention". But is that so? At school, children who are fatter, thinner, taller or shorter than more average contemporaries, or have red hair or green eyes, get teased, or bullied, by them. Racism isn't a human invention. It is a fact of nature. Once it was essential for the survival of the race. Now it is as obsolete as the human's tail, appendix or tonsils.

To say that racism is a human invention makes it seem up-to-date and rational. It is not. It is primitive and unintelligent.

Sir Reginald EW Harland

Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk