To the manager of the Giant Food supermarket in Union Deposit, Pa.:

So, I see where you hacked off some of your customers with a recent promotion. You put fried chicken on sale “in honor of Black History Month.” Which begs the question:

What, no watermelon?

Seriously, I’m trying to imagine the thought process that went into this. Wasn’t there a point at which klaxons began honking in your brain and a voice like the robot’s from “Lost in Space” started chanting “Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!” Apparently not. From what I hear, even after a customer complained, you couldn’t understand why it bothered him.

So now your corporate office has been obliged to issue an apology. That will surely do wonders for your career. Plus, the head of the local NAACP is weighing in.

I’m going to make an assumption here. I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that you didn’t wake up that morning thinking to yourself, “What can I do today to insult black people?” And assuming that assumption is correct, what’s it say to you that you somehow managed to do so anyway?

I’ll tell you what it says to me: That our level of intercultural dialogue in this country is abysmal. That all we different kinds of Americans live at an intolerable remove, one from the other. That a significant portion of the insult and hurt feelings that pass between races, genders, sexual orientations, religions, probably grows not out of intent, but ignorance.

Not that I find that comforting. The person who slurs me because he doesn’t know any better is, in some ways, more vexing than the one who does so out of pure hate. I mean, at least I can write off the latter as a defective human being. The former I must find a way to deal with.

And that, take my word for it, is not easy.

The problem is that we live cookie-cutter lives, go through our days hemmed in by comfort zones, cloistered by our perspectives, surrounded by people who look and sound just like us. We don’t know the exotic-looking people who live just across the street, just down the block, just around the corner. All we know is that they are, in some highly visible way, Not Like Us.

Maybe we’re curious about them, maybe we’re dying to know why they wear what they wear or speak as they speak or believe what they believe, but for some reason, we never ask. We have, almost literally speaking, no way to ask. So instead, we assume.

And you know what happens when folks assume.

I’d like to recommend a Web site to you: www.yforum.com. A journalist friend of mine set it up a few years ago. It’s designed for people to post questions, ask that nagging thing they’ve never understood about blacks or whites or gays or Jews, and have people from those communities respond.

My friend, Phillip Milano, tells me he’s “continually amazed” by the things people don’t know about one another. “The level to which people are still disconnected is sometimes shocking.”

Speaking of which, let me do my part to close that disconnect. Let me explain about fried chicken. It’s not that black folks don’t love it as much as anybody. But for longer than you or I have been alive, the eye-rolling, slow-talking, chicken bone-sucking black has been a staple figure of white racist propaganda, immortalized in movies, music and song. So African-Americans are, understandably, I think, sensitive about anything suggesting a greater-than-average love for the bird.

Silly, isn’t it, when you think about it? Here’s something sillier.

As a child on a school field trip, I once refused to eat my boxed lunch  chicken  because there were white kids around. A lonely little stand against stereotype which would have been a lot easier, let me tell you, had white racist propaganda accused us of an unnatural desire for some other food. Like liver, maybe.

But I digress. My point is that you have to know that you don’t know before you can learn. So find some way to invite into your comfort zone somebody who’s not like you. You may save yourself some grief.

In the meantime, just in case you weren’t aware: a sale on bacon in honor of Yom Kippur?

Bad idea.

 Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald.