LETTER: Yuppie Coffee

In response to Sarah Goldfine and Theresa Weir's column "Sam's Place and the Evils of White Gentrification" (DP 2/10/92): Ladies, you two have been drinking too much "yuppie coffee." The boy who was shot at Sam's Place didn't go there to drink coffee or eat pastry -- he didn't go there to buy the white man's "overpriced groceries" . . . the plain and simple truth is that he went there to rob the place, armed with a knife. In the "real" world such actions carry consequences; unfortunately Andre McNatte paid those consequences with his life. Should shop owners allow people to rob them simply because the robbers are black, is that just another thing the white man "owes" the black man? Regarding Ramona Africa, she is where she belongs, in a cage. Fact of the matter is that Mumia Abu Jamal killed police officer Daniel Faulkner in cold blood -- eyewitnesses have attested to the fact. Police investigations have uncovered that Jamal was seeking revenge on a police officer who had earlier given him a traffic ticket -- riding in the same number patrol car that Officer Faulkner was driving that day. Unfortunately for Daniel Faulkner (and his wife and children), Jamal didn't understand the Philadelphia Police shift schedule and couldn't comprehend that the same cop wouldn't be riding the same car number day after day. So Jamal mistakenly shot Officer Faulkner -- I'm sure for him the feeling was just the same; for radicals like him, any white face will do. I've lived in Philadelphia all my life and quite frankly, I'm sick to death of the tired old song that you girls are singing -- whatever goes wrong in the black man's community is somehow the white man's fault. Cry me a river! RITA GODFREY Staff