o the Editor:

With Nicholas D. Kristof ("Love and Race," column, Dec. 6), I, too, celebrate love across racial categories. But his "revolution in attitudes" is not yet a revolution.

Consider Yusef Hawkins, the black teenager murdered in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in 1989 by white men who believed him to be visiting a white girlfriend. Consider that the prosecution's main police witness in O. J. Simpson's murder trial declared that he would pull over a black man driving with a white woman. Indeed, if Mr. Simpson had been accused of murdering a black woman, or if the Central Park jogger had been a woman of color, would these events have commanded the same degree of national attention?

Not long ago, the lynching of black men could result from fabricated rape charges — that in turn resulted from knowledge of consensual romantic relationships with white women. Our celebrations must not blind us to the legacies of American racism.  
MARTHA HODES
New York, Dec. 10, 2002
The writer is the author of a book about white women and black men in the 19th-century South.