You deserve to be punished with several fists to your face! You’re nothing but a troublemaker! I’ve had enough of your Racist talk! You’d better watch what you say and to whom you say it! You may just end up in the hospital with several injuries or maybe on a cold slab in the local morgue! You’ve got a big mouth that needs to be slammed shut permanently!

Local morgue? Slammed shut permanently? These threatening words are taken from a letter sent to me by an anonymous white person. It was handwritten in black ink, covering both sides of a yellow sheet of paper torn from a legal pad. It is one of hundreds of letters, emails, postcards and voice messages I received — to say nothing of menacing discussions of me on white supremacist websites — after I wrote and published the essay “Dear White America” in December 2015 here at The Stone. What I had offered as a letter of love had unleashed the very opposite — a wave of white hatred and dehumanization.

Some white respondents wrote about desires of kicking me and leaving me “half dead” or “knocking my head off my shoulders.” Others made an assessment of my academic bona fides: “This coon is a philosopher in the same way Martin King was a PhD and the same way that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are ‘Reverends’: Just another new way to pimp.”

After receiving the letter that spoke of a cold slab and shutting my mouth permanently, I decided to share it with my students in my graduate philosophy seminar. I needed a witness — perhaps I needed my students to help carry some of what I was feeling. So, I read it aloud.