The technique of infamy is to invent two lies and get people to argue over which one is true.

It's absurd to suggest that Darren Wilson is a racist. Any white person who robbed a store, assaulted the clerk, slugged a cop, tried to take his gun, then ran away, and then turned back and charged the cop would have been shot repeatedly until he fell and stopped moving.

But it's equally absurd to suggest that we're not a racist culture, or that life isn't a great deal harder here for people of color, or that the incidence of shootings of young black men isn't a national disgrace, or that we white Americans aren't collectively guilty of turning a blind eye to all that. We should do whatever it takes, and spare no expense, to create a culture in which black youth aren't prone to find themselves in the position that Michael Brown was in.