The bottom line, of course, is that the "errant" verdict is blamed explicitly on the skewed racial makeup of the jury and implicitly on the skin-mediated sense of justice supposedly held by the non-Black jurors.

This sort of thinking, which defines individuals solely in terms of all-encompassing racial and ethnic identities, is not new to America or its court system. No doubt it can also be historically validated, especially in the South, where white juries regularly convicted Blacks in bogus trials. The death penalty has also been shown to discriminate against Blacks.

More recently, in the wake of the L.A. riots, there's the case of a Hispanic police officer in Miami accused of killing two Black motorists.

The trial can't be held in Miami, as potential jurors there have expressed concern that an acquittal will incite rioting in their own communities, so the judge is seeking an alternate venue that has the appropriate ethnic and racial makeup.

And bills have been introduced in the California and New Jersey legislatures that require judges who change the venue of a trial to choose a community similar demographically to the original location.

The same arguments are heard in favor of diverse faculties and even newsrooms on campuses across the nation, including Harvard.

But is the underlying premise true? Can--and will--an individual of a certain racial or ethnic background judge fairly in a case that pits a member of his tribe against a member of another?

Few people will dispute that individuals' racial or ethnic background informs their world-views, especially in a society as race-conscious as ours. But so do a lot of other factors--like gender, class, sexual orientation and religion. That's the only way to explain why the only thing shared by people like Shelby Steele and Leonard Jeffries is the superficial color of their skin.

I DON'T KNOW what the schools in Simi Valley teach, but when I was growing up here in Potomac they taught us about equal rights and equal opportunity for all Americans. Right now, those words are a lot more meaningful for kids on this side of the Montgomery County-D.C. border than on the other.

But after the L.A. riots, the emphasis should be not on changing America's goals--as some racial and ethnic Balkanists would advocate--but on fulfilling them for all Americans. That's no lily-white suburban dream--just an American one.