Letter to the editor: Sentinel has an unhealthy obsession with the name ‘Cabrillo’

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To the editor:

After two full weeks nonstop of publishing Letters to the Editor whining about nearly everyone under 60 in our county not wanting our local community college named after a genocider, the Sentinel editorial staff has lost the thread.

In Stephen Kessler’s column last week titled, and I kid you not, “Whiteness isn’t what It used to be,” he argues that Indigenous Californians of today were the real colonizers and that white supremacy should be renamed Latino supremacy (a conclusion he reaches using arguments like Catholics are Latino, because Latin lol).

Why? In order to justify his and the Sentinel’s unhealthy obsession with the name “Cabrillo.”

After calling Indigenous folks responsible for their own genocide (the Sentinel went so far as to publish a letter which argued the mission system was good for the original locals), Kessler states, “ Latino supremacy … is part of California history and is in the blood of half the population. Those who can’t or won’t acknowledge this reality are living in an essentialist dreamland.”

This is racism at its silliest, spouted by a relic who is old enough to know better.

John Mulry
Capitola