Incivility Collides With Ignorance

Thankfully, Mr. Azeff is expected to make a full recovery. Meantime, Mr. Mitchell, said to be a good kid who has never been in trouble before, remains jailed in lieu of $50,000 bail. It is difficult not to see in them a certain symmetry.

That's not an argument of moral equivalence: Mr. Mitchell allegedly pulled a gun, so the moral weight for what happened rests squarely upon his shoulders.

And yet it's also true that each teenager had what the other lacked. One knew his rights, the other, his history. But neither realized you cannot fully appreciate the one without understanding the other. So each young man fell into the other's blind spot.

If we were a people with the courage to teach our racial history fearlessly, and the foresight to inculcate in our children a reverence for civil liberties, this tragedy might never have happened. We are not those people.

And because we aren't, these two boys hurtled toward collision, hopped up on grievances and rage they were ill-equipped to speak - or hear. They took a test that night in Sarasota, and let no one be surprised they failed.

They never had a chance.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for The Miami Herald. His column appears regularly in The Baltimore Sun. His e-mail is [e-mail].