Everybody in America, for example, knows who James Byrd is, and that he was brutally murdered by three whites in Jasper Texas four years ago. Byrd's lynchers offered him a lift in their pickup truck, beat him and chained him and dragged him to his death. An entire nation was outraged and guilty. The President issued a statement, legislators wrung their hands and the media keened over the inhumanity of the act and what it portended for the country's future.

Four years later - this year in fact - a white man named Ken Tillery, hitched a ride in Jasper, Texas. He was given a lift by four black men who then murdered him to a deafening national silence. Like Byrd, Tillery was held hostage and beaten. Then he was run over and crushed to death. The copycat nature of the crime made it a natural news story. But there was none, save a modest account in the Houston Chronicle, to which nobody paid any attention. This savagery was apparently nothing. The pigments were politically incorrect. It was only some white guy, whose ancestors probably owned slaves.