I grew up in a rural area of upstate New York that was overwhelmingly white, with almost no racial minorities around to speak of. In school, and in books, magazines, and on TV, I was bombarded with messages and tales about the extent of horrors that whites had done to other races over the generations, especially to blacks. For example, I was a tender lad of 13 or 14 when the wildly successful TV miniseries about slavery, Roots (based on the book of the same title by Alex Haley), dominated the airwaves and the national consciousness. Some of my schoolteachers...