Dahleen Glanton: Society treats black males as less than human. The shooting death of a 14-year-old in suburban Chicago is the latest example

There is no reason to think that the shooting death of a 14-year-old African American boy by a legal gun owner in suburban Chicago had anything to do with race.

Lots of people, black and white, have been killed at the hands of legal gun owners. And the unjust law that allowed Lake County prosecutors to charge the victim's teenage cousins and a friend with his killing has affected white kids as well as African Americans. The underlying issue is not race. It's the fact that these are kids.

Yet the public response to the killing has exposed the racial fault line that that lies beneath almost everything that happens in America these days. It has once again placed an ugly truth about mainstream America in the spotlight - that it