In a week full of alarming stories about racial prejudice, the most unsettling was not about the sickening details of how James Byrd Jr. was chained to a pickup truck and dragged to death--a crime that last week led a jury in Jasper, Texas, to impose the death penalty on one of his killers. Nor was the worst situation the continuing fury over the fatal police shooting in New York City of unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo or the equally infuriating police shooting of 19-year-old Tyisha Miller last December in Riverside, Calif.
The worst wasn't even the revolting tale of the...